The 10 Steps
by jw77
Summary: A series of vignettes featuring our favorite little family of four. Rating is for later chapters.
1. Stance

A/N So, it turns out that for one who is just beginning to learn archery, there are 10 basic steps to keep in mind when drawing, aiming and shooting the arrow...and thus, a writing exercise was born for yours truly. All the chapters here will be short vignettes; call them warm-ups if you like. I already know which ones I want to expand into multi-chapters. They will all center around our favorite little family of four. Alas, the characters aren't mine, I'm just borrowing.

Step 1: Stance

_**The archer stands upright in a comfortable, relaxed position with one foot each side of the shooting line. The feet should be about shoulder width apart with an even amount of weight taken on each foot and an even amount of weight between the ball and heel of each foot. This will maintain balance and help keep the body steady.  
During the shooting sequence, the body position must **__**remain**__** as steady as possible with no shifting of weight or leaning of the body...It can become difficult when a person is right-handed, but with a left eye dominance or vice versa...The person will probably have to keep their left eye shut, until learning to use their right eye for aiming.**_** -****Graeme Jeffrey Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008**

"Okay, let's try again."

Our little girl slouches out in the meadow, bow in hand, lips pressed together and brow furrowed in a familiar scowl. Both she and Katniss are frustrated; the grassy field around them is littered with miniature arrows, none of which has hit the intended target. I watch them from the shade of an old oak, not far from where Katniss' house used to be; I lean easily against the trunk, hands behind my head. Our son naps on a bed of moss beside me, his mouth agape, drooling onto his arm.

Katniss circles our daughter, scanning her body position. "Feet apart...bounce for me?" Prue straightens her back, bounces up onto her toes, then back onto her heels. A grin plays across her face, and the gap just shows where one front tooth is missing, and it makes my heart ache, just a little. "Okay, good and balanced. Shoulders down?" Prue drops her narrow shoulders. "Shake 'em out..." The girl giggles as she bounces her shoulders crazily up and down. It is a hot day and the thin straps of her shirt reveal the glow of olive skin, her bare shoulder blades like wings.

"All right," Katniss breathes as she backs off to the side. "Now we draw, and aim..."

Prue lifts the small bow in her left hand and the arrow in her right, drawing back in one smooth motion until the string rests against her chin. She sights on the old, rusted-out oil can Katniss has wedged into one of the last remaining patches of chain link fence on the edge of the woods. She tilts her head strangely when she's aiming, Katniss says: she turns her face in to the arrow, or something. I look for it now. Her form doesn't look too terribly bad to me, but then, I've never shot an arrow in my life.

A gun, yes. But not an arrow.

"Wait, hold on," says Katniss, and she takes a few steps forward, studying Prue through narrowed eyes. Prue lowers her bow arm, uncertain; she has been told to never, never, _never_ point an arrow at a person. Ever. No matter what.

"I think I know what the problem is," my wife says, moving her head back and forth in front of Prue like some strange bird, side to side, studying her eyes, first from one angle and then another.

"What?" Prue whispers, the bow now relaxed. She watches her mother as she always watches her: like Katniss is a goddess, deigning to impart wisdom. Prue's blue eyes are wide and never leave her mother's face.

"Here, do something for me. Put your bow down for a sec..." Prue places it softly onto the grass, then pops back up. The easy smile has stolen back onto her face; it's never gone for long. And it's impossible not to smile back, as Katniss now does, as she instructs, "I want you to try something. Hold up your hands like this."

And she holds both hands at arms' length, straight in front of her. She places the tips of her forefingers and the tips of her thumbs together, forming a rough triangle. "Can you make a triangle, like this?"

Prue nods and holds her own hands out, making a triangle of thumbs and forefingers.

"All right, now make it smaller, so it's just a little window," and she moves her palms closer together, forming just a small opening between her splayed hands.

I sit up a little straighter against the smooth trunk of my tree and drop one hand onto the sleepy boy's blonde head; it's sweaty, and I work my fingers through his curls with a frown. I'm not sure where Katniss is going with this...

"Now, we're going to find something far away, something to look at through our little window." She scans the horizon, uncertain, and Prue spins wildly, looking too, liking this game. Finally Katniss spots her target. "There, over there. Do you see Leevy's house?"

Leevy is Katniss' neighbor from way back; she escaped the firebombing with her family in '75 and moved back to 12 shortly after we did. She built herself a house in the smouldering ashes of the old Seam, a bigger house than she would have had in the old days, but only slightly. The kids love to visit her because she works as a tailor now, making clothing for practically all of 12, and she makes them little dolls out of cloth scraps. Leevy loves their visits. She always has.

Prue is bouncing up and down now. "Yes! I see it, Mama."

"So, lift up your hands and put Leevy's house in your little window."

Prue does this, looking at the distant rooftop through the opening between her hands. Katniss focuses on Prue's face as she says, "Now. Keep both eyes open, that's very important." Prue opens her eyes comically wide, giggling. "And bring your little window closer, and closer, and closer to your face...keep looking at Leevy's house, keep it in focus..."

She and I both watch as Prue practically goes cross-eyed, keeping that rooftop in her sights. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, but I find myself watching very closely as Prue's hands get closer to her face, and finally settle that little window...over her left eye, not her right.

"Hah!" Katniss shouts with a smile, and claps her hands. "I knew it. You're left-eyed."

"Huh?"

"You're right-handed, but left-eye dominant. So you're shooting with your right, but trying to sight with your left. That's why all the shots are going wide." Katniss is grinning down at her and Prue looks skeptical, one eyebrow raised. "You're going to have to close your left eye when you aim, and train your right eye to do most of the work. Can you close just this eye?" She taps the left side of Prue's face. I see my daughter's cheek screw up and the eye closes.

"Good. Let's try again."

Prue takes her stance. Draws her bow in one smooth motion, just like she's practiced. Closes one eye and takes aim.

Katniss' fists close and she bites her lip. "Shoot straight, Little Bird."

Prue draws her arm back just a little further and lets the arrow go, and there is a muffled crunch as the arrow catches the oil can dead-center and knocks it through the hole in the fence.

My mouth pops open, as does Katniss'.

Our little girl is immediately jumping up and down on the spot. "I did it! I did it!" She raises her bow above her head, arm pumping.

And Katniss and I both have a moment. I can see it in her suddenly-stiffened posture, I can feel it in the dread that washes over me like the tide. Because in that moment, our daughter looks like...a Victor.

My mind flashes back to every tape of every Hunger Games we ever watched, dreading the moment when the winner would stand at the end, finally alone, victorious. A Victor. Some of them were so jubilant, pumping their fists as my daughter does now, accepting their dubious honor with such relish. Not understanding that there were never any winners in that Game. Not really.

But the moment passes. Prue is six, and tiny, and her weapon is no more than a toy. Her smile is not bloodthirsty, but gap-toothed and adorable. She is innocent.

Completely innocent.

Sage wakes up when he hears his sister belting out her new favorite song: "I diiiiiid it, I diiiiiid it, I diiiiid it..." It is accompanied by a kind of spinning dance; she sets her bow down softly and then she's off, across the meadow, twirling and skipping and singing.

"Sissy?" the little boy asks, still sleepy. He rubs his eyes a few times with chubby fists, then struggles to his feet and runs after her. "Sissy! Sissy! I dance. Me too." Prue is turning cartwheels on the grass now, her long hair skimming the fluffy tops of the dandelions, and Sage's chunky legs struggle to keep up with her lithe, graceful ones.

Katniss brushes her fingertips through Sage's curls as he breezes by, and the gentle smile on her face right now, as she watches him run, is worth everything.

She saunters over and settles down at my side, and we watch our children dance. "Glad we finally got that figured out," she says, rubbing at mosquito bites on her forearms and not meeting my eyes. She's still thinking about that moment, earlier, when we both nearly lost it. "Turns out she's pretty good for only six years old."

"Well, she has a great teacher." I work my hand over her back, up underneath her braid and give her neck a tender squeeze; she leans into me.

"The best teacher," she scoffs. We both chuckle. "My dad had to do that eye test on me, too. When I was first learning."

I glance at her, but say nothing; she's still carefully not looking at me. She's frowning faintly as she watches the kids frolick in this beautiful, sad place. "Peeta?"

"Yeah?"

"How do we tell them?"

Tell them what? Where to begin? Tell them why there are so few people here? Why Mama and Daddy are covered in burn scars, fading but still very much there? Why there are certain places where Mama still can't go, by law, like District 13? Why Daddy has to go away and be by himself sometimes? Why Grandma never, ever visits? _I have no idea_, I want to tell her. Instead I say: "We wait for the right time. When the right time comes, the words will come."

Katniss heaves a long, tired sigh, and settles back against me. I wrap my arms around her and we just sit.

Finally she says, "I'm glad it's just a game for her."


	2. Nocking the Arrow

A/N: Did I mention that these scenes will not be in chronological order? Well, they won't. Just lil old me, playing around with the space-time continuum.

About this installment: I. can't. help. myself. This is pure candy-writing, done only to please myself, and if you're offended by smut you should skip straight to chapter 3. Smut-lovers: enjoy.

Step 2: Nocking the Arrow

_**Nock the arrow by placing the nock of the arrow onto the bowstring...make sure that the Index Fletch on the arrow is facing towards you and the nock is pushed firmly onto the bowstring. **_**Graeme Jeffrey, Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008****  
**

It has been 3 weeks and 4 days since we've spoken.

I am absolutely not counting; I only happen to remember because this is the hottest stretch of summer that anyone from 12 can recall. Ever. And this hot weather, this sticky hot mess of too-hot-for-September air that you practically have to swim through, started on the very day The Fight happened.

And okay. I've deteriorated beyond what you might call healthy. I leave the house to hunt and I come home and cook for myself and Sae and her granddaughter and sometimes Haymitch, if he's awake and sober and not at Peeta's instead. (He says Peeta's a better cook, so he's more often there. Jerk.) If no one is there then I cook for myself. I leave the dishes and they make quite a pile next to the sink, now. Then I shower, and try to sleep, and page through the book we had started working on, before.

I don't answer my phone.

I know Dr. A tries to call sometimes. And my mom. I know because when I don't answer they call Haymitch, and he tells me, and when I don't answer him he starts yelling, and when I still don't answer he storms out, muttering.

And okay, yes, maybe I shouldn't punish everyone else for something that's my fault. My weakness. But that never stopped me before.

"You're afraid," he said, that day the heat wave started.

We'd been spending the day together, as had become our custom, slowly, over the course of the six months or so we'd been back. We'd do our own thing in the mornings; I'd be in the woods and he'd be in his kitchen. And then we'd meet up for lunch, sharing some of his bread and some of my meat, and some greens or berries or whatever else. In the afternoons, when it was too hot to go out, we'd work on the book. And then, dinner, sometimes with Sae or Haymitch or both, sometimes without.

And then, bed.

Bed had become really nice.

We had slipped back into our old habits without really discussing it. It started with us talking late into the night, playing half-silly, half-serious games of Real or Not Real. Sometimes we already knew the answers, sometimes we genuinely wondered. We'd end up burrowed into the couch cushions, fast asleep, together. It happened a few nights in a row, and then...I kind of just started tugging him up the stairs after me, and we'd talk in bed until we fell asleep there, instead.

But.

There was never a morning when I didn't wake up long before him, when I didn't wake up in a complete panic to find myself so close to him. In the muddled, dim confusion of pre-dawn, I'd lie there and go over and over every sneer and hurtful word we'd exchanged during that year, and my throat would start to close up again. There was never a morning when these thoughts didn't take over, when I didn't ease out of the bed and into the bathroom to dress, and out the door before he'd stirred. Not really breathing again until I was well away, into the woods, up a tree.

It beat hiding in closets.

We never talked about the nights, during the day. We didn't talk about how we'd started touching each other, in the dark, the faintest little touches. A brush of the arm, a playful push that lingered a bit too long. He brushed my hair out of my eyes once, when there was a bright enough moon to see by, his fingertips tucking the stray lock behind my ear and then tracing the ear's shape, fingers lingering there in a way that could have been accidental, had it not set my body shivering and stopped my breath. He saw me stiffen, and he pulled away and didn't touch me again that night. I couldn't see his face.

And still, we didn't talk about it.

So when he told me I was afraid..."Of you?" I said, raising one eyebrow at him from across the garden. "I don't think so."

The vegetable garden was Dr. A's idea. It straddled Peeta's yard and mine, a safe activity for us to share. Supposedly. It was stocked with Capitol seeds which grew mammoth-sized tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and peas and needed minimal tending. This was a rare morning together in the garden, because the day was going to get too hot to work like this by afternoon. The air was heavy and moist, the shade trees only giving partial relief. We were weeding, working on our knees and weilding three-pronged garden tools that could be quite deadly, in the right circumstances.

It was hot.

I caught his eye across the tomato bed, that morning, and he quickly looked down, but not before I became aware of what he had been looking at. Me. A nod to the weather, I was wearing just enough to cover the worst of my scars and the grafted skin: a loose-fitting blouse over a tank top, and shorts that were pretty darn short.

The pink puckers on the backs of my legs are nothing compared to the absolute mess that is my back and upper arms: a horror of burns and new and old skin, mottled and peeling. I don't exactly do sleeveless anything any more. But the top was pretty low cut and the shorts were, um...I hadn't thought twice about it when I dressed that morning. I couldn't think of anything else, now.

I straightened up, dropping my tool and wrapping my arms around myself, biting my lip.

He just smiled, but he corners of his mouth tightened and he looked away, gripping the garden tool in one hand. He studied the trees, looking everywhere but at me in the most obvious way possible. Finally I made a kind of huffing noise, blowing the loose strands of hair away from my forehead, and turned to go back in the house. And maybe not come out again.

"Okay, okay," he said behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder. He caught my eye and grinned, this time for real. "You got me. I like looking at you, okay?" He looked down, scratching at the sweat pooled up where his real leg ended and his artificial one began. "I think you're beautiful."

_Damn him_. Trust him to _just say _something like that, to say it and just leave it hanging in the heavy, sodden air between us. "Yeah, right," I mumbled, fingering one of the uglier scars on the back of my left thigh, where the flames had licked and seared the day my sister died.

He frowned. "What, the scars?" He threw the three-pronged tool down into the dirt, hitched his fingers up under his shirt and, before I could say anything to stop him, pulled it up over his head and threw it down in the dirt, too. "Yeah, I've got them too."

And then it was me who didn't know where to look. A lifetime ago, I'd felt like I had known his body pretty well. We'd been forced to kiss, and kiss, and kiss some more for the cameras, and there was almost nothing real and genuine about it, but it does breed a certain familiarity. There had been the nights on the train, where nothing technically happened. But still, being in bed with someone for that many nights in a row makes you more than familiar with their body.

And then there was the Training Center. And after that, The Beach. Incidents I'd pretty much banished from my memory. Too much happened, I let too much happen when I thought I was going to die, especially when the cameras weren't on us. And then I didn't die, and I couldn't think about all of what he'd been to me in those last days, because...there was no _him_ any more. For a very long time.

But I had to look at him now, because he was very much back, and very much real. I hadn't seen him like this in a long, long time, and, damn my eyes, I was curious. So I looked.

His scars didn't seem as bad as mine, and they predominated on the right side of his body. You could see where the flames had raked up his torso; the pink wrinkled skin began under the waistband of his shorts and continued up his side, scorching his shoulder and upper arm. You could tell he'd gotten it the worst on his right shoulder; that and on his upper thigh had been where he'd gotten his skin grafts. His neck and one side of his face were also scarred, and his eyebrow on that side would never fully grow back.

I noticed this, but I also noticed how he'd gained back some of the muscle he'd lost, last summer. How those shorts, borrowed from a neighbor in the Seam, didn't really fit any more. How he was sweating. How blue his eyes still were, how long those blasted lashes.

I tore my eyes away, turned toward the house. "I'm going to make some lunch, want some?" I leaned down to pick up the basket full of giant Capitol vegetables we'd gathered, and I knew, absolutely knew, that he was watching me as I straightened up and walked back to the house with the basket balanced on my hip. I knew, but I didn't turn around.

I heard his clumsy step behind me as I set the basket down on the counter. I took a deep breath and turned around and he was there, right there, so close...all at once he was stepping closer and closer and oh my god we were kissing.

It was so unexpected that I couldn't react, couldn't do anything but throw my hands up in surprise. His hands were cupping my face and I found my own hands betraying me, snaking around him and pulling him closer, my fingertips settling into the groove of his spine like they belonged there. Our bodies were touching along their entire lengths. He was so warm. All of this, after a year of Nothing.

I opened my mouth and touched his lower lip with my tongue, and for a moment it was almost like I wanted this. Almost like I had missed it, like I needed it. Needed him.

And then I gained control of my hands again, snatched them back and flattened them against his bare chest and pushed as hard as I could. Pushed him away.

To his credit, he kept his balance, only stumbled backward, his face registering shock.

And this is what we said to one another:

"Stop it," I spat. "Just stop."

More shock. Disbelief. "What..." He shook his head, blinking rapidly. "What the hell just happened?"

I worried for a moment that he was going over the edge, that my aggression had pushed him over into another episode. But then the anger won out. "You tell me. You seem to think we're..."

"Go on. I seem to think we're what?"

I couldn't finish the thought, because I had absolutely no idea what I was trying to say.

Peeta had no such problem. "Enlighten me. What are we doing, exactly?"

"We're..."

"I'll get you started. We sleep together every night. We spend every day together. What are we doing?"

"I..."

"What, Katniss?" He seemed to deflate. "Just...just tell me what you want, and I'll do it."

"I want you to go." The moment the words left my lips, I wanted to take them back.

"Really." He looked so tired, and I didn't blame him. He turned to the door. "Okay." His hand was on the doorknob. My back was still pressed up against the counter, my pulse pounding in my ears. He paused, and said, "You should know that I love you."

"Then stop it," I told him. "You don't want to do that."

He didn't move to leave, but didn't turn around and face me, either. So I went on. "I...I'm never going to be more than what I am now. I'm never going to want to get married or have children or any of that normal stuff. It can't ever be like that, for me."

Silence.

"You should..." I let out a long sigh. "Stop trying to make this into something normal. And good. We can never have that." A long pause. He stood there with his hand on the doorknob, head hanging down, shoulders slumped. Finally I told him, "You should go."

And he did.

So it's been three weeks and four days of unrelenting humid awfulness. The heat gets worse day by day; our garden is a brown, withered mess. There are weeds, but I'm not going to be the one to pull them.

I'm too busy trying to keep the nightmares away.

For some reason, I always go back to the first arena, in my nightmares. It's like my mind can't get past that first set of horrors, can't set to rights that initial shock that sent my life off kilter. I always go back to Rue and the spear, and Glimmer's bloated body, and Cato and the mutts and the chewing, ripping...

Prim comes to me, too. _You can't go_, she tells me, pulling at me with her sharp little talons. I wake up screaming.

The days are unbearable. The sun is hot and the air is heavy, there's not a breath of wind. The trees hang limp; even the animals are sluggish, easy prey. Like they don't mind being killed. I've stopped eating them.

I've taken up running.

I leave every morning at dawn. I dress and slip across the lawn while it's still kind of dark; sometimes there's a light on at his house and sometimes not. I run and I run until I reach the lake, and then I run past the lake and my father's little house. At the beginning of the heat wave it was still late August, raspberry season, and I could fool myself into thinking I was going to gather berries. But the heat withered them, too.

I run until I can't, and then I climb until I can't. And then I cry, up in a treetop where I can't hide from the blazing sun. My burns and grafts and even my remaining real skin turns reddish, then peels, then fades to brown.

In the late afternoon I creep back through the woods. I don't run back, I stagger. I stop frequently to shoot, to gather, making up for the wasted day. By the time I reach my house it's twilight and the heat has backed off somewhat, but there's still no fresh coolness in the air as there should be this time of year, in the evening. There's no relief.

I eat, because I have to, and there'll be more bother if I don't. I wash, because I have to. I fall asleep with the Book cradled in my arms.

I wake up screaming.

Today a bear chased me.

That hasn't happened in years. I'm usually wary enough to avoid them. But it's getting late in the season, food is scarce for them with the drought, and I was wandering home later than usual, picking through the darkening woods, being quiet but not really careful. Thinking. And I startled her. She was as thin as bears come, sweating underneath her thick fur, cranky and gaunt, as I was. We froze.

I blinked first, and she charged, which they end up doing about half the time. The only thing to do is run, and I did, back the way I had come. It was like one of my nightmares come to life: trying to swim through the humid air, to force it in and out of my lungs, looking frantically around for a good climbing tree; all the while the hungry, mad beast is gaining on me, breathing like a bellows.

I flung myself at a scrub pine, scratching my arms and the insides of my thighs, sap tangling my hair. I clutched and climbed, and the bear caught the heel of my shoe, and I kicked at her, letting her have the shoe and climbing higher, higher. Sometimes a black bear will follow you into a tree, and I was prepared for that, but this one was satisfied with my shoe. I felt a searing, stinging pain in my bare foot, and glanced down to see that the bear's tooth had opened a gash along the sole of my foot; long, but not deep.

I stayed up, frozen against the tree trunk, until long after the bear had wandered away, until long after the sun went down. I wasn't really in a good perch, so I had to use all my muscle power to hold myself up. When I could finally get my limbs to move again, I eased down the tree trunk and practically fell to the ground, arms and legs burning, foot stinging each time I set it down.

When I reached my yard, his light was still on. Like he was waiting for me.

I had no food with me. The heat pressed down. I clambered into the shower and let the hot spray fall on me for an hour or more, blood from the gash in my foot and the scratches on my arms and legs washing down the drain. When I walked out into the hallway, there was air moving through the open window, and I smelled rain.

I fell into bed, naked, exhausted, broken, waiting for the storm.

Tonight, the bear visits me again. She is a mutt-bear, twice the size of a wild animal. Her eyes are bright blue, like Prim's. She bellows at me with a voice like thunder, trying to tell me something, and she slashes at me with her claws, my legs, my gut, my throat. Every place there is a spurting artery, my heart's blood. When I am almost bled out, weak and whimpering, the thunder of her voice booms at me again, and I can finally understand what she's trying to tell me.

_Wake up_, she says.

I jerk awake to real thunder booming outside the open window, but I still don't know where I am and I'm tangled in the sweaty sheets and I feel like I'm still weak and bleeding, so I kick and flail until I realize there's someone in the bed with me.

I freeze. He's not lying down, he's sitting on the side of the bed. He's saying something. "It's okay, it's okay." His hands are clutching at my hands, are smoothing my hair. "It's okay. Wake up. You're home. It's just a dream." He looks me in the eye; I'm still panting, in panic mode, trying to run. "Not real," he says. It's the only thing that will cut through to me, right now. "Not real, sweet."

_I've never had anyone call me that, _I think. I don't question his presence here, in my house, in my bed. It's as natural as breathing. I don't question his right to be here. He belongs here.

My eyes are fighting their way shut again, but my hands are still awake. They're clinging to him like he's life. Outside, the thunder crackles and the rain begins to fall.

It's still falling, in a soft steady patter, when I wake up again. It's late. He's in bed next to me now, propped up on one elbow, waiting for me. The sheet is pulled up to my armpits; I don't know whether he knows I don't have anything on. I don't know what he has on, come to think of it, and I'll be damned if I'm going to look.

"Hi," I say, rolling onto my back and smoothing the sheet with my palms.

"Hey," he says.

"Thanks for...before."

He smiles. "Of course."

I pause, and he gives me the time I need. And then: "Why...why are you..."

He shrugs, laying back on the pillow and settling his arms up above his head. "I was worried about you. You were really late getting back." He turns his head, catches my eye. "You were missing a shoe, and limping. And later..." He frowns, and his eyes search my face. "I heard you. Dreaming. So, I came over."

"Oh." I look down at my hands, face warm. There is a low rumble of thunder outside the window, and a delicious wind rustling the curtains, drifting through the room. "Yeah, the dreams have been...intense, lately."

"Mine too."

I say nothing for a minute. And then: "So you just happened to see me coming back? Or, you were waiting for me?"

He's silent for so long that I think he may not have heard me, so I turn to him, and he's looking at me so intently, with such sadness and tenderness and concern that I want to cry again. "I'm always waiting for you."

My stomach plummets, sub-basement. I look down at my hands, clasping each other on top of the sheet, and I think of the blue-eyed bear from my dream, and the Fight, and the garden and his scarred, burned and broken body. My breath comes harder and harder, until I'm almost hyperventilating. And that's when the tears come.

They come in a flood. They crowd out of my eyes and down my cheeks like the rain outside my window. I clutch my own hands. And he is there, he is turning to me and holding me like he always does, cradling my own knotted hands in his until they open again. His fingers wipe at my face, gathering the tears as they fall.

"I'm..." I choke on the words, try again. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Peeta."

"Shhhh. No."

"I'm sorry!"

"No." He kisses my cheek, just under my eye, and I think about how he's tasting my tears and how intimate, how _raw_ that is. "It was my fault too. I pushed too hard. I know better than anyone that you can't..." He sighs. "That you just can't heal that easily."

I try to speak again, but it comes out as a sob, and he's kissing my face again, murmuring for me to sssssh. Holding me so gently. The sheet slips, and he's holding me against him still, so warm and solid.

I've missed him.

I lift my face up and meet his eyes, heavy-lidded. He blinks slowly. Kisses my face again, where the tears have fallen, but more slowly this time, deliberately. Weaves his fingers into my hair and trails kisses along my jaw, my chin. I close my eyes.

He lets one hand fall, fingertips trailing down my back, and I feel him pull back a little bit when he realizes I have nothing on under the sheet.

Then his breath comes out all in a rush against my throat. I close my eyes and clutch at his shoulder as he buries his lips in my throat, exactly where the bear in my dream brought the blood. His quick and deep and desperate kisses burn into my skin; a warmth blooms in my belly. His fingertips dig into my back, pulling me closer to him as his mouth roams lower.

When his lips brush my collarbone and his hand brushes the side of my breast, I let out an embarrassing squeak. His eyes fly open and he kind of shakes himself, as though he's been sleeping. He pulls away, frowning; I try to catch at his hands but he's having none of it.

"Sorry," he's saying. "I'm sorry. I...know you don't want...this. I just..."

I'm shaking my head, but his eyes are closed. I open my mouth but I can't speak. It's choking me.

"I'll go," he says, in a whisper. "If you..."

"No," I croak out. I don't even think it sounds like a word, but it stops him and he frowns at me. He's pulled away, carefully not touching me, clearly in pain. "Peeta, I...I do."

"You do...what?" He leans in, I think just to hear me better, and touches my bare shoulder with his fingertips.

I swallow, my throat dry. "I do want this," I whisper. As soon as I say it, I realize it's true. I want this. Him. More than anything. Not just his hands or his mouth, but all of him. Right now.

He blinks rapidly; his chin trembles, he wets his lips and, for one second, I'm afraid he's going to refuse, retreat, like I've done from him so many times.

Then in the next instant, there is a gentle flicker of lightening and a long, rolling rumble of thunder, and his lips are crushing mine, his mouth devouring me. He is like the tide. These are not quick, desperate, hopeless kisses, but full-on, strong and deep and burning into my skin. Shamelessly, I let out a faint moan and let my hands skate over his shoulders, back, hips...

He pulls away, smooths the hair off of my face. We are both breathing like we've just run a mile. A sly smile steals across his face. "You should know-" He pauses, leans in to kiss me, soft and sweet. "...that I love you."

I want to slap him. For making me feel all of this when I don't know what to do with it, what to say, for making me weak. Instead, I move in and catch the curve of his jaw with my lips. Then with my teeth. _Hungry...I'm hungry_. For this.

His hand curls around the curve of my breast, the thumb brushing my nipple.

Oh. Oh, it is _on_.

I rake my fingers through his hair. There is nowhere...oh. There is nowhere his hands do not go.

No part of me that he will not find with his lips. I could scream.

Parts of my body that I never considered, never spared much thought for, are now centrally important. I am thinking of nothing else, there is nothing else in the world. This is beyond what's happened before, what I felt in the training center and on the beach was only a shadow of this.

I am paralyzed with the pleasure of it; I can't even respond to him. He's...giving to me. Again.

My eyes fly open. Again, he's doing this. Giving me everything, all of himself. Working only for me. Loving me, asking nothing in return.

It's terrifying.

"Peeta," I say.

"Mmmmm?" His mouth is strategically placed.

I shudder, gasp. "Peeta?"

He moves with quick, light kisses until he can cover my lips with his again. "Yes?" he murmurs, moving again to my throat.

But I pull away. "I want..."

His eyebrows lift and he half-grins, nodding at me. Waiting.

But I don't really know how to say what I want, except:_ I want to give this back to you. All of it, what you're giving to me and more. I want you to feel what it is that I can't say._

"Um..." is all I can manage.

He runs his fingers through my hair, from scalp to ends, and his hand trails down my side, over the curve of my hip, and lingers on my thigh. "Tell me what you want," he whispers.

Eyes wide, loving. Full of trust I don't deserve. Here is a man who will give me anything, anything I ask. If I asked for his heart, he would serve it up for me himself and watch me devour it whole.

It scares me, so I do the only thing I can think of: I conquer it. I grip his shoulder and push him away, back onto the pillow. I roll with him so that I'm lying half on top of him, my right leg hooked over his. I can't quite meet his eyes, but I can feel him watching me as I smooth his hair back, then lean down and kiss the burn scar where his eyebrow used to be.

I trail kisses down his cheek and throat, and down and down as he did with me, but my lips are barely grazing his skin. My fingertips follow everywhere my mouth goes, tickling with the lightest touch I can manage. My heart is pounding in my ears and I'm dying to really kiss him again, but at the same time I'm enjoying this teasing exploration, and the sounds it's eliciting from him. I must come close to kissing every part of him, as he did with me. Scars or skin, whole or damaged. I want it all.

Finally my lips graze, and then close into a kiss, on a part of him I've only ever felt with my hand, in the dark and terror of what we both thought was the last night of our free lives.

He shoots upright in the bed; I draw back to find him sitting up, staring at me with a violent intensity. In a moment of horror I wonder if I've done something wrong, or set him off into a flashback. But no, he doesn't look angry. He reaches for me with trembling hands.

"Please," he whispers.

I launch myself at him, straddling his legs and kissing his mouth hard, hard. _ Yes_.

He wraps one arm around me and holds me to him; I can feel him trembling. He props himself up with his other arm and slides us back until his back is against the headboard. I grip the top of it with my hands and lean into him, sucking on his bottom lip and then his chin. He wraps his arms fully around me, pulling me closer, closer, down and forward and-

_Oh._

The pain is so immediate, so sharp and deep and raw, that my eyes fly open and I let out a strangled gasp. Peeta's eyes are squeezed shut. Everything has stopped.

I frown; it's not the worst thing I've ever felt, by far. But it was shocking. I wasn't ready for it. One second we were kissing and the next...he was there. Right there. And now-

There is a rumble of thunder, more distant now. A gentler pattering of rain. The storm is moving off.

He tilts his head up and kisses me. Very simply and gently, chastely even (which is ridiculous, if you consider where we are at the moment), like we're starting over, like he's asking me_ Is this okay?_

I don't know yet. He's holding himself very still, so I dig my knees into the bed and shift myself slightly to one side, to get my legs settled more comfortably. Every movement causes pain, like raking my fingernails over an open would: raw and sharp.

He deepens the kiss, licking at me with his tongue, pulling me closer with his warm hands. I shift my legs again, and this time...this time beyond the pain, I can feel _him_. All of him.

Oh.

He kisses me with all the love he has, and I_ let _myself feel it,_ let _myself take it from him. His bread, his pearl, his life. What he wants to give me. All of him. I let it wash over me in a shudder; he feels it and moans against my lips.

And then...we move.

I surprise myself by becoming rather insatiable.

Pillow talk is nice, but after twenty minutes of our own, new, sweet-and-then-dirty version of Real or Not Real, I have to tell him, "Shhhh. No more." Have to climb on top of him, crush him with kisses. Take what's mine.

It's close to dawn when he wakes me again.

He rolls over and immediately has my whole body pinned, the length of his body against the length of mine. I can only respond with a faint "Oof," before he grabs my wrists, pins my arms above my head and proceeds to maul me.

That's the only way I can describe it. He is crushing the breath out of me, and I'm about to say something when I realize that his eyes are closed not from bliss, but because he's still sleeping.

I frown; I've heard of sleepwalking, but sleep-

_Oh wow_. He is inside me, and the suddenness of it jolts through my body. There is no pain, not after our two (three?) earlier encounters, but a part of me realizes that he wouldn't be doing this in precisely this way, were he awake. I try to wiggle out from under him, a nervous laugh bubbling out of me, but his hands are still clamped around my wrists and he's resting all his weight on me...

And I can't believe it, but it feels kind of good.

I should wake him, he'll probably never forgive me for not waking him. But a part of me, okay, a large part, is really enjoying the way he's just..._taking_. For once. Just enjoying. My body is enjoying too. I'm on my back and I feel so exposed, so out of control. Dangerous. He's so close and the friction it's creating, the wonderful, warm pressure of him...I close my eyes and throw my head back.

And that's when he chooses to wake up.

"What...oh god..." He props himself up on his elbows and stares at me. "Katniss?" He looks up and sees that he's pinning my wrists, and immediately lets go. "Oh my god, I'm..." He starts to move off of me.

I grab his earlobe between my teeth, and pull him back down. He hisses in surprise.

"Don't stop," I breathe into his ear.

He grabs my wrists again.

"Don't ever stop."

After, he wraps me in his arms, and I lay my head on his chest, over his heart, the way I used to.

"When the morning comes, you're not going to run away again." It's not a question.

"No." I trace patterns over his abdomen with my finger, smile at the gooseflesh I'm creating. "No running."

"I'll still be here," he says.

"I know."

"Will we still be here?"

I know what he's asking, and for once I know exactly how to answer. I prop my head up on my hand and smile, a wider and fuller and more honest smile than I've been able to manage in a long time. In the overwhelming goodness of him, in the power and pureness of what we shared, I forgot the horror for a time. Maybe, with time and practice, I can learn to forget more.

"We absolutely will."


	3. Drawing Hand

A/N Still not entirely happy with this one. Just had to get it out there. Stay tuned.

Certain lines lifted from _Catching Fire _by Suzanne Collins

Step 3: **Drawing Hand**

_**Curl the fingers around the bowstring so that the first joint of all three fingers are aligned on the bowstring. Keep a space clear between the index and second fingers and the arrow nock, so the fingers do not touch the nock. (This will prevent 'pinching' of the arrow.) **_**Graeme Jeffrey, Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008**

The two children were models of decorum when they entered Leevy's shop ten minutes ago. Now, as she wraps their mother's special-ordered purchase in thin tissue paper and places it in a gift box, they are circling the front room like mini-typhoons, the boy chasing the girl around the display shelves, the girl trailing her grubby fingers lightly over every garment she passes, making the wooden hangers click against one another, skipping just out of her brother's reach and finally making him cry in frustration. He plops himself down in the middle of the shop and wails wet sobs in his mother's general direction.

Katniss turns from the counter and gives both of them a blazing stare. "Will you kids _please. Knock. It. Off."_

Silence.

"Just quit running around. I'll be done in a second, and then we're going to the bakery."

Katniss turns back to Leevy, reaching across the counter for her box. The blazing anger drains out of her eyes, leaving only dark-ringed fatigue. She slumps against the counter, and Leevy smiles sympathetically. "Remind me, how old are they now?"

Katniss sighs, squinting her eyes at Leevy, like she really can't remember. "Prue is seven, and Sage..." She throws a glance back over her shoulder at the golden-haired boy who, tears forgotten, is now attempting a headstand on an embroidered silk pillow on the floor, his feet flailing and kicking in the air. "He just turned three," Katniss deadpans.

Leevy smiles. "They'll grow out of it."

Katniss raises her eyebrows and nods, her face still grim. "So I'm told." She slumps over the counter with another long sigh. "_Sage_. Put the pillow back _right...now_." Katniss has not turned around, but still, Sage immediately stands and flings the silk throw pillow back onto the shelf, knocking several others onto the floor. His grey eyes are wide as he backs away, ducking behind a rack of flimsy, filmy dresses unheard of in 12, Before.

Katniss' mouth is pulling into a smile; Leevy stifles a laugh into her hand. Unable to resist, Leevy flicks her eyes down at the box on the counter and then back up at the woman before her, raising her eyebrows.

A beat passes before Katniss understands her unspoken question, and her mouth pops open. "Oh god! No. No. It's not for me." She laughs silently, rolling her eyes. "God, at this point...I'd probably shoot myself."

Leevy blinks and nods. Presses her lips together.

"No, Posy's baby shower is tonight," Katniss continues.

Suddenly everything is clear: the special-ordered pearl-colored satin from the Capitol, the glossy green ribbon interwoven with embroidered bumblebees. Carefully genderless. A tiny dress, too fancy for a doll, but perfect for a longed-for, already-adored first baby.

It has taken Leevy several nights of late hours to finish it.

"Oh..." Leevy allows her voice to trail off, and looks beyond the woman at the counter to her daughter, who is now leaning against the glass in the display window, breathing on it and tracing designs into the condensation with her finger. A heart. An arrow. A smiling face. "Is that tonight?"

Katniss follows her gaze and instantly her frown is back. "Prue Mellark. Stop it. You know that will leave smudges on Leevy's window."

"It's okay," Leevy says. "I have a boy from down the road who washes the windows for me once a week." Katniss turns back to the counter as little Prue wanders away from the window. "I pay his mother in socks without holes in the heels."

Katniss' smile is back. "Remind me of that, when Sage is a little older." She takes the box and, instead of turning away, studies Leevy for a moment. "Aren't you going tonight?"

"Um..." Leevy pretends to study the day's receipts, shuffling them between her fingers. "I've got a lot to...catch up on..."

"Come on," Katniss begs. "I hate these things too. But it's Posy." Leevy knows what she means. Their families know one another, from Before. The children all babysat one another at one time or another: Katniss watching Leevy and her brothers and sisters, Leevy watching Vick and Posy later on. They should have been close, all of them. Once, they were just three girls from the Seam.

"I guess I..."

"Please?" Katniss is biting her lip. "We can sit in a corner and hate it together, and then we can use the kids as an excuse to leave before things get extra-cutesy."

Leevy stares for a moment at the indents the small, pearl-white teeth make in the older woman's surprisingly delicate pink lips. "All right," she says finally. "I guess the socks can wait."

Katniss smiles fully as Leevy locks up her shop, then follows Katniss and her children out into the brisk spring evening. "Thanks," Katniss breathes, as they make their way to the warmly lit Bakery, where the dreaded baby shower is taking place. The kids run ahead of them across the Square with its colorful paving stones, its now-silent fountain, whooping and leaping into the air, all the freshness of spring alive in them. "You're a lifesaver."

_You have no idea, _Leevy thinks.

Before, Leevy's family lived in a tiny cabin on the very edge of the Seam, a few doors down from the Everdeens. Leevy, the eldest child, shared a bed with her two sisters, Lily and Marigold. Their little brothers, Bruce and Jaytee, slept in a heap on the smaller bed across the room.

As the eldest, Leevy had her choice of prime bed spots. She could have chosen to sleep in the middle, between her sisters, where the bed was warmest, which would have been advantageous on cold nights. She could have chosen the outside edge, so as not to wake her sisters on the mornings when she had to get up extra-early to put on the kettle for her Pa's tea, when her Ma had been up late with one of the boys.

But instead, Leevy chose to sleep on the inside, against the wall, near the window.

The window that looked out on the Meadow.

A lot went on in the Meadow that everyone knew about. It was one of the only green places in the Seam, and was a nicer place for a fellow to take a girl than the slag heap. Leevy had seen plenty of that. She'd also seen congregations of men, heads bent over betting slips around the time of the Reaping, money exchanging hands just dirty enough that they couldn't make their deals in the Hob. Illicit goods sometimes changed hands there; sensitive herbs, pills and powerful liquor were all traded and bought over the sunny patch of earth.

But Leevy was pretty sure she was the only one who knew about Katniss.

A few months after the older girl's Pa had died, Leevy had started seeing her almost every morning, slipping under the chain link fence and into the woods. Soon after, Katniss and her sister had stopped looking so drawn and starving, and their mother began appearing out of doors again. Leevy had smiled to herself to see Katniss and Prim scouring the Meadow for dandelions, digging up roots. Coming back to life again.

Even at nine, she knew better than to mention it to her mother, or anyone. "We take care of our own," her Ma was fond of saying. Her Ma, who hoarded the few coins her Pa brought back from the mine each week, who had to stretch them thin enough to feed her own family, thank you very much, never mind anyone else's.

Leevy would wake before dawn, every morning, and prop herself up on one elbow to watch Katniss.

She had dreams, before she woke in those early mornings, in which she followed the older girl into the woods, and the two of them climbed trees together all day and walked back home with their arms full of meat and greens, and then at the end of the day, the two of them would climb into bed together.

But not in the way that sisters would. This was where the dream got a little fuzzy.

She woke to find only her sisters beside her, and an aching in her chest that had nothing to do with hunger.

Many times, over the years that followed, Leevy saw a Peacekeeper or two wandering toward the Meadow in those dangerous, pre-dawn hours...it was not unheard of for Peacekeepers to take part in the illicit betting and trading. In fact, their infusions of Capitol cash and goods were counted upon by the seedier elements in 12. As an inhabitant of the very last house in the Seam, Leevy was in a position to see them coming, and if Katniss was still in sight when they came, she would spring out of bed and run down the lane. Intercept them before they reached the Meadow, with loud requests for money or candy. Distract them with nonsensical stories she'd make up on the spot, hang about them until they finally retreated back to town, frowning over their shoulders at the crazy Seam kid who never shut up. Sometimes she'd drag a spare sister or brother along with her, for plausibility's sake.

She'd take a scolding for bothering the Law, listen to her mother tell her that no good could come of getting yourself noticed.

But Leevy knew that no good came of being ignored, either.

"Oh my god," Katniss whispers, and Leevy can hear the panic in her voice. "It's so..._pink_."

The bakery, usually a bastion of normality, has been transformed by Posy's friends into what Katniss-and Leevy-considers a living nightmare of femininity. A Capitol baby-shower-monster appears to have thrown up in Peeta's bakery. There is a raucous pin-the-diaper-on-the-baby game, in full swing. There is a baby food tasting station over in the corner, quickly devolving into a sloppy food fight. And there is Posy, in the center of the room and a crowd of heavily-made-up women, rosy and huge and basking in all the attention, holding her arms up while said women, normally perfectly rational people, wrap lengths of yarn around her bulging waistline, to see who could come the closest to guessing her circumference.

Peeta, Leevy surmises, will be hiding in the kitchen, cooking up some more of the little hors d'oeuvres she sees around the room. This much pink is too much for even his modern sensibilities. Prue tiptoes away at the first opportunity and slips through the kitchen door on hunter's feet, to join her father. _Smart girl._

"Katniss! You came!" The squeal is high-pitched enough that only dogs should be able to hear it. Katniss submits to an enthusiastic embrace from a very-pregnant, very-excited Posy, while the colorful women flutter around them. Leevy stands back and can't help but chuckle, at the cringe she sees crossing Katniss' face, carefully masked when she pulls back.

Katniss holds Posy at arms' length. "You look fantastic! It's hard to believe you're only due in five weeks..."

Leevy recognizes this as a kind lie; Posy Hawthorne-Wood looks approximately 45 weeks pregnant, possibly 46. It is amazing that the baby can still fit inside the bursting drum that is this woman's belly. But it is her baby shower, and she must be told that she looks fantastic, and from her limited knowledge of normal female interactions, Leevy thinks Katniss is pulling it off admirably.

Then Katniss runs off after Sage, who has somehow become tangled up in all the various lengths of yarn and is presently being "helped" by several dozen concerned females. And Posy turns to Leevy, and her face immediately falls, in a way that Leevy knows to mean that she doesn't really recognize the older woman. Leevy doesn't blame her; she isn't very memorable.

But then Posy places her, and is all smiles again. "Oh Leevy! I haven't seen you in ages, thank you for coming." And she grabs Leevy's hands in both of her own, and squeezes. "Us old Seam girls have to stick together, right?" Her tone is joking, but there is something steely in her eyes that makes Leevy relax immediately, makes her understand that this shower is not for Posy, but for her Capitol and District 2 friends. There is something of that irrepressible, tenacious little nymph that Leevy remembers under the layers of makeup and baby-fat.

Posy has spent much of her life in District 2, where her oldest brother made a name for himself in politics and her family had found a more secure, luxurious home that they ever could have dreamed of back in 12. She has now married one of her brother's political allies, and though Leevy does not understand the particulars, it is clear that Dior Wood is not in attendance tonight, and does not share his wife's fondness for her home district.

So she smiles, and murmurs, "For sure, Pose."

And then Katniss is there, again. Holding a yarn-free Sage against her hip with one hand, and the box with the carefully-stitched baby dress in the other. And she does something completely unexpected.

She taps Posy on the shoulder and says, "Hey. This is from Leevy." She thrusts the box at Posy, who glances back at Leevy, eyebrows raised. Leevy shoots Katniss a look, but she just shrugs. "Well, mostly Leevy. She did all the work; I ordered the cloth and then didn't have a clue what to do with it." She grins at Leevy, who is having trouble breathing, silently daring her to contradict her.

Posy's eyes fill with tears when she pops the box open, and she covers her mouth with one hand. She shakes her head slowly and meets Leevy's eyes; Posy is crying as someone else-a friend from 2-lifts the tiny, beautifully crafted baby dress from its protective wrapping. There is a general gasp from the crowd of women, and they immediately gather around Posy and her friend to admire the glowing satin, the delicate green ribbons, the painstakingly embroidered honeybees and grape vines.

Leevy backs off a few steps and allows herself to stare at Katniss, now that the other woman's attention is occupied. She tries to be angry at this unexpected reversal.

She can't be mad. How little Katniss has changed; how kind she still is. Everyone else she knew from Before is now showing their age, including Leevy herself, with her dark hair shot through with grey, and her hunched gait. Her mother had gone grey and hunched in her late thirties, too.

But except for a few subtle lines along her eyes and mouth, and a very slightly more rounded belly because of the babies, Katniss could be the same, slight, dark-haired girl, the one whose sister was called out in the square all those years ago. The one who would die before she took credit for the good she'd done, before she took happiness away from someone she loved.

_Someone she loved._

The door to the kitchen opens and two curly heads peek out: the taller one blonde, the shorter one dark. Peeta and little Prue. The girl is grinning out at the crowd gathered around her mother and her "aunt" Posy, but the man's keen eyes find Leevy immediately. They lock eyes and he sees that she's trying to sneak out; his expression melts into a small, sad smile. He nods at her, and she nods back.

He's always understood Leevy. Always, and has never breathed a word to Katniss. And Katniss has never suspected Leevy of feeling more than friendship; the idea simply never enters her head.

Leevy backs away and away, until she reaches the door of the bakery. No one sees her leave; she presses the door closed behind her, and looks back on the cozy, warm scene just once. Peeta has left the kitchen and is hoisting Sage up onto his shoulders above the crowd, while Prue is nestling her hand in one of her mother's, reaching out to touch the satiny baby garment with one delicate finger.

Before, Leevy had always wondered whether there was anyone else like her in the world.

It hadn't seemed so. The other girls in her class had hung together in clumps to talk about the boys, more and more as the years passed; by the time of the Quarter Quell, when Leevy was 15, most of them already had boyfriends. Leevy had tried to share their enthusiasm, she truly had. But she couldn't see, when she looked at the boys in her grade, what differentiated one from another in terms of attractiveness. She would hear the other girls discussing this boy's shoulders, or that boy's eyes, or another one's butt, and she'd study the pertinent parts in a vain attempt to distinguish what made them so special. She couldn't. They just seemed an unruly mob, loud and obnoxious like her brothers.

But she'd pretended to be like the other girls.

Most of them, her classmates and the boys they'd admired, were dead now. Leevy felt a great yawning cavern in her heart when she thought about them, and about her father. Leevy's mother, brothers and sisters had all escaped into the woods That Night, the night of the firebombing; they lived on the edge of the Seam, so it was just a matter of running across the meadow and scrambling over the pulled-down fence, and then deep into the woods to safety. Her father had seen his family safe, and then run back into town to help Gale and some of the others; he'd spent the night running back and forth, back and forth, pulling screaming people from the scorched remains of 12. And then, one time, he hadn't come back.

In 13, Leevy had learned that there were others. There were girls and women who caught her eye during class, military training or dinner hour. A small smile, a knowing gaze held a moment too long. They inclined their heads, beckoning her into corners, whispering hurried questions, instructions. Secret meetings. Caused her heart to leap, to burn, to beat right out of her chest.

She didn't know how they'd recognized her; perhaps there was some outward sign she gave off, of which she wasn't aware. No matter; _18:00 Reflection _was reserved for these women and the empty classroom that was their stolen refuge...and their shy, clandestine kisses, their hesitant caresses. The Classroom was always dark and cold, and smelled of chalk, and echoed every sound back at you, amplified a thousand times.

Though she certainly liked what they did, she didn't know if she liked these others, of 13. They were secretive and stoic, and never acknowledged one another outside of the Classroom. They left her burning and breathless, and just as alone as she'd been before. Missing the one she really wanted.

_She_ would not have been cold, like they were.

There was one, Fran, a few years older than Leevy, with long dark hair and a slight frame, who almost reminded Leevy of..._her_. Fran had grown up in 13. They used to talk, more than the others ever talked to her. "This can be fun," Fran told her. "But only for a little while. Eventually, they want you to get married." _Why? _she'd asked. _Why would they want us to marry, if we don't want to? _"They need kids, haven't you noticed?" Fran was bitter, her mouth pulled into a hard ugly line. "Need more breeders. People like us don't help them with that. Can't get babies this way." She'd grinned and moved in for another kiss then, but Leevy had shied away, mumbled that she had somewhere else to be. She'd heard Fran crying behind her as she stumbled from the room, pulling her jumpsuit closed over small, soft breasts. Shivering and sweating all at once.

The idea of marrying some man, one of the indistinguishable mob she'd never love, of being forced to have babies who would only grow up to be forced to have more babies, was the first blow of the one-two punch that had finally broken her spirit.

The second blow was Katniss.

When Leevy learned that she was there, too, in 13, that she'd been rescued, her heart had swelled. The two worst days of her life had been the day of the Reaping, when Katniss had volunteered, and the day Gale was whipped in the town square, and Katniss had stood bravely up and taken a lashing for him. In both instances Leevy had stood mute, her mouth open in a silent scream, as the girl she'd loved and admired for so long basically threw away her life for someone she loved. She'd stood motionless the day of the whipping, and caught Katniss' arm and offered to help only later, when Thread and the Peacekeepers were gone, when the danger was over. Proving that she was not brave, that she was not worthy...that if it had been Leevy in that arena, she'd have died, simply died, another puny girl from 12.

No, she knew that she'd never deserve Katniss' friendship, or even attention...but just to know that she lived, that she was all right, would be enough. But she hadn't caught sight of the older girl for several weeks. It was said that she was "recovering." There was talk that she'd lost her baby from the electric shock she'd received in the arena, that she was in "treatment" for emotional shock. That Peeta had been captured and she wasn't dealing with it very well. Selfishly, Leevy didn't really care about him; she just wanted to see Katniss, just wanted to see for herself that Katniss was going to be okay.

Then one day, she saw her: Katniss, sneaking along the far end of a corridor, her face drawn and frightened, searching furtively for something, maybe a place to hide. They said she hid in odd places. Leevy almost cried for joy; she was here! Alive! And...

And not okay. Anyone could see this was a person who was not okay, and not going to be okay any time soon. She had the glazed-eyed look of someone on way too much medication, the half-starved look of someone who ate what they told her to, but did not absorb any nutrients. She slipped across the corridor and into an empty classroom that day (not The Classroom, but another one), and Leevy stood on the spot with her mouth hanging open, watching the closed classroom door until someone made her move.

After that, she began following Katniss. She was disturbingly easy to follow, now. As in the Seam, her family lived only a few doors down from Leevy's, and Katniss rose early. She stumbled down dark corridors, her feet scuffing the polished floor, her hands reaching for balance against the walls. Leevy began skipping classes, training, missing her rendezvous in the Classroom. She couldn't make this better, but she could at least see that Katniss was not disturbed. If it had been her, the constant worrying and distraction from the over-eager healers in 13 would have driven her mad. The girl needed time to get her bearings, and Leevy could help her get it.

So she found herself running interference, exactly as she had when the Peacekeepers strayed too close to the Meadow back home. When Katniss' handlers came too close to discovering her hideouts, Leevy would be right there, asking inane questions, needing immediate assistance or information or directions to this or that place.

She even flirted with a hapless medical intern, once, letting her uniform fall open in front and pretending not to notice. The poor man's eyes had practically bugged out of his head, and Leevy couldn't help but giggle into the back of her hand when he glanced back at her after saying goodnight outside her quarters. She'd barely avoided a kiss.

He'd become annoyingly persistent, that one, right around the time of the assembly. The one where the Mockingjay Deal was announced. Strangely, Katniss hadn't been on stage with President Coin; Leevy had tried to rise up on her toes and spot her in the crowd, but was held back by a sudden pressure on her hand. The medical intern, holding her hand, smiling down at her, his deep brown eyes (how had she never noticed them?) crinkling at the corners. Her stomach plummeted all the way to her knees; she gulped and averted her eyes to the floor.

What now?

The drunkard Haymitch called it a "focus group." It was basically a collection of people who knew Katniss. A lot of the survivors from 12, together again, in Command, of all places.

The minute Katniss entered the room, Leevy couldn't take her eyes off her. This was a different person, no longer the distracted, frightened ghost who had haunted the corridors of 13 for weeks now. She looked annoyed and frustrated, certainly, but more in the old way, in the way Leevy remembered. In the set of her shoulders she recognized the old Katniss, the one who would wait impatiently by the gate when she was made to babysit Leevy and her brothers and sisters, the one who slipped under the fence and into the freedom of the woods despite the threat of death, every single day, for the love of her family.

The love for this girl burned in her again, stronger than ever and more hopeless, now that she acknowledged to herself what it was.

Katniss stood straight and strong...and scowled in the old familiar way, and Leevy couldn't help but grin. It hurt her face, because it had been so long. She was back. She was _back. _She was _alive._

And then...Haymitch asked for one time, just one time, when Katniss had made her feel something.

No one said a thing, and Leevy's mind reeled. One time? Just one? How about a million? A million little moments, from the very beginning of her memory. Katniss bandaging Leevy's skinned knee when they were very, very young, her suddenly pale, queasy face at the sight of Leevy's blood, her hands still steady. Katniss waiting by the gate, a scowl on her face, as her mother tended to little Jaytee with the measles. Katniss standing in that square, throwing her sister behind her and stepping up on stage to take her place.

Katniss sitting here, now, her face registering panic as no one spoke, and Coin's face settled into a self-satisfied smirk. Katniss, needing help.

Leevy opened her mouth and spoke into the silence. "When she volunteered to take Prim's place, at the Reaping." Her face burned as each head in the room swivelled toward her. Including Katniss; their eyes locked for just a moment, and Leevy saw surprise and then recognition on the older girl's face. _She probably didn't even know I was here in 13_, Leevy thought, as she took a deep breath and continued, her voice wavering, "Because I'm sure she thought she was going to die."

Recognition, and something else too. Katniss was grateful. Her features relaxed as Leevy watched, into a simple look of relief and gratitude that someone had finally spoken up. _She didn't know_, Leevy realized. _She really thought no one was going to say anything_. Someone else started talking, giving another example of how Katniss had made them feel something, and she looked away.

Katniss honestly thought no one else had noticed, Leevy realized. Like the whole country wasn't now privy to her heroism. Her bravery and complete lack of self-interest. Her loyalty and kindness, and her love. Like everyone didn't now know what Leevy had always known.

Leevy shook her head and let her breath out in a slow sigh, completely failing to register anything else that was said.

_She has no idea._

_Katniss was right; Prue's fingers did leave smudges on the window_. Leevy stands there at the front door of her little tailor's shop, above which is her apartment, in which she will sleep alone, tonight. She will sleep under her warm quilts and above the racks of ghostly clothing downstairs, and miles and eons away from the mother, sisters and brothers, neices and nephews she left behind in 13. To come here, to see _her_, to know beyond doubt that she is okay, finally.

To make dolls for her children, and accept sympathetic smiles from her husband.

The night has grown cold; her breath puffs out in white clouds.

She clasps the doorknob with three fingers, evenly spaced, and squeezes gently, but is unable to open the door and close it behind her, unable to look away from the impression on the glass, clearly visible in the cold night. At the smudge of a clumsily-rendered heart, pierced by a jagged arrow.


	4. Setup

A/N One line lifted from _Mockingjay_ by Suzanne Collins.

Step 4: Setup

_**Push out with the bow arm to set the hand position into the bow grip,  
then raise the bow arm and drawing arm together...Keep the front shoulder in its normal low position...Keep the elbow of the drawing arm high, as this will help bring into action the back muscles needed to draw the bow to full draw.**_**Graeme Jeffrey  
Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008**

His soldiers knew him as Boggs, but Drew knew him as Dada.

He liked it that way. Though Drew understood that Dada put on a uniform every morning and shed it, dirty and sweaty, each night, he knew very little of Boggs' work. The nursery classes in 13 were not military-oriented, and children that young were not permitted access to television screens. Additionally, they were not permitted outdoors, where the exercise fields and shooting ranges were. Children were in their classrooms, not in the corridors, when Boggs' young soldiers in training would jog by in their uniform jumpsuits, their boots pounding the polished floors.

Boggs' son still knew how to smile. It had been three years since his mother died, and Drew would never know how much he resembled her: the fine, golden hair that wisped into curls around his ears, the deep brown eyes. The creamy skin that always seemed too rosy, too rich for their underground, sunlight-deprived world. It was as if the two of them, Halla and Drew, belonged to some other place, some sun-drenched world above, some time before the bombs had driven them all underground.

Drew had been the first to fall ill with the pox. Boggs' first awful thought, when Halla carried the baby to him, frowning, and made him feel the skin burning with fever, showed him the funny raised, red lesions on the boy's forehead and cheeks...was that he had carried it home himself. It was known that there were some who carried the virus without catching it themselves, and Boggs spent three days and nights wondering if he'd inadvertently killed his son. He'd washed so carefully after visiting his comrades who'd already fallen from the pox...but maybe he hadn't been careful enough.

Then came word that several more children in his baby playgroup had fallen ill, and Boggs felt an awful, shameful relief.

On the fourth night of unrelenting fever and white blisters completely covering her son's face, arms and legs, Halla had walked to the hospital wing with Drew in her arms and Boggs by her side, and demanded to see a doctor. The boy was so quiet, so unlike his typical boistrous, laughing self, that his parents were terrified. He stared at his mother with glassy eyes (God, thought Boggs, he even has those white blisters in the corners of his eyes) as she fought to see a doctor.

The doctor dismissed them with a wave, saying Drew was a fine strong boy and it was a "textbook" case of pox and the fever would break in a day or so, and the sores would crust over and fall off, and Drew would recover. "He's one of the lucky ones," the doctor told them, listening to the baby's lungs with a stethoscope.

Halla sank down to the floor as the doctor walked away, cradling her son in her arms, and looked around the ward. Boggs looked too. Was Drew lucky? Yes, compared to some of these other people. They lay unmoving on bed after bed, the unlucky of 13, the fever-heat coming off them in waves. Loved ones slept in chairs to the side, or curled up beside them in the beds. Some were dead already. The ward was mostly silent.

Drew was almost better, the last of the scabs still waiting to drop from his pale, clammy skin, when Halla fell sick.

Hers, the doctor said, (the same doctor, damn him, who had been right before), was the black pox. She didn't seem to have a rash at all, at first, not like Drew had had, but the doctor said that was because her lesions were under the skin. Waiting to kill her.

Boggs walked her home and nursed her, feeding her thin broth and bathing her head with cool cloths, cradling her compliant, wilting softness in his arms the way he had when she was a girl and he a boy, not so many years ago. They did not speak. He had said everything he'd needed to say to her already, every day for five years, five unspeakably happy years. Every night when the lights would go out in their compartment, he'd pulled her close and whispered to her all the things that didn't need saying now. She knew them by heart.

She went to bed on the sixth day and didn't wake up again; after Boggs carried her to the hospital, the lesions began bursting under her skin, and her beautiful pert round face and soft gentle hands turned from rosy-cream to black, like a bruise that covered her whole body, in half a day. There was blood trickling from her ears, from the corners of her eyes and mouth, bubbling up her throat. Her fever spiked up to 106, and her heart faltered, and she died.

The floor fell out from under Boggs. He spent the night beside her body, curled around her as she grew cold. In the morning they took her body away, and they scrubbed him with disinfectant, and he walked back home. He held the baby in his lap for half a day; young Drew mostly slept, still recovering from his fever, but when he woke he called out for his Mama. He was hungry. He wanted his Mama, Mama, Mama.

Boggs stood and carried the crying baby to his brother and sister in law's compartment. Jeen took Drew from him without a word and stifled the boy's crying into her shoulder. Porter pulled him into a rough, brotherly version of a hug, and Boggs received it numbly and stumbled away.

He walked back to his office in the training center. Opened the drawer and studied his service revolver, silently, for a few hours. Thought about it very carefully, weighing it. Then he closed the drawer with a heavy sigh. No. For the boy. No.

He threw himself to the floor and started doing pushups. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. He broke into a sweat, thought about how, at the end, she'd lost so much fluid to bleeding that she'd been unable to sweat the fever away. He flipped over and did a hundred crunches. Tore through his office until he found the free-weights, gathering dust behind a cabinet. Lifted them. Lifted for hours.

Every day for weeks he punished his body as he couldn't punish the Capitol, whose scientists, it was thought, had engineered this modified version of an old illness. Most of those who survived the pox were rendered sterile, the Capitol's final insult to District 13, and one they must have known would deal a fatal blow. 13 had been wrestling with the problem of a flatlining birth rate for years, and now about half of them would be wiped out by this pox. And the other half unable to reproduce.

He hadn't had Drew examined yet. Didn't really want to know if he was looking at the last of the Boggs men when he looked into those somber brown eyes. The boy didn't smile any more, not since he came to understand there was no more Mama.

He threw himself, physically, mentally and otherwise, into his work, with a new purpose in mind. Barked orders at the kids who came his way, the fractious, unruly 14-year-olds newly gifted with the title Soldier. He harped on them mercilessly, shouted at them until he was hoarse, worked them in the rain and the snow and the baking sun. Made them earn their titles. Earn his respect. Walk taller and look sharper. Turned them into soldiers.

He got himself noticed. He got himself promoted to Central Command, where he could be a direct part of the upcoming move on the Capitol. Finally. He won Coin's favor by making his feelings about the Capitol clear, and maybe because she knew about Halla (she knew about everything), she trusted him.

His new office was adjacent to Command.

He went home every night at 18:00, picking up Drew from Jeen and Porter's compartment and carrying the boy back home. They played quietly for the half hour before dinner, building with blocks or drawing on an erasable slate. Boggs would search his son's face when the boy was occupied, heartbroken that he didn't ask for Mama any more. That he was young enough to forget her.

Halla's absence filled up the tiny living space like a flood. Drowning them.

...

Boggs had never really watched the television before the 74th Hunger Games. Of course it wasn't required viewing in 13, and indeed, few people would admit to paying attention when the Games were on each summer.

All the same, one couldn't help but notice that more electricity was used during those few weeks in the summer than at any other time of year. Televisions were on at odd hours of the day and night, when people should have been busy with other things. People were watching.

Boggs thought of such people with contempt, before that summer. He sustained that contempt until he caught a glimpse of the dark huntress from District 12, sprinting away from the first-day bloodbath with an orange backpack clutched to her side. He'd heard the whispers, of course-the boy from 12 was in love with her! He would protect her in the arena, even to the death!-but he didn't believe them.

_You'd have to be a fool to believe that._

He started making a point of strolling by Command when the Games were on the screen. The military payed close attention to the Games each year; often, the choice of tributes and the obstacles they were made to face spoke to the general mood in the Capitol and, by extension, the general mood of President Snow. This year, for instance, the tributes were generally younger than average (and would have been even more noticeably so, if the girl from 12 hadn't volunteered to take her sister's place), indicating that Snow wanted to send a clear message to the Districts. That no one was safe, even the smallest and frailest of children, that anyone could be chosen, made an example of.

Boggs thought of Halla being _made an example of_, and clenched his fists, and he watched the girl from 12 as she fed herself (and later, her tiny ally), outsmarted her enemies, and generally made herself the top contender for Victor. He watched (and listened to the growing buzz in the hallways) as her hapless district partner made his unrequited love ever more apparent, earning himself a fatal blow to let her run away.

_Idiot, _thought Boggs.

Until the announcement, he thought the boy an idiot. Until the girl jumped from her tree and hunted the wounded boy down as surely as she'd hunted prey. Then, Boggs caught on that the boy may know something about his district partner no one else did, something about her true character.

When she finally found him in the muddy riverbank, he looked at her like...

Like Boggs used to look at Halla.

The memories hit him like a bunker missile, and he fell down into a chair in Command, spilling coffee into his lap. In his mind, Boggs was 16 again. He was watching Halla across the training yard; she was easy to spot, with her golden hair and rosy cheeks, her easy smile even after she'd run five miles. Half the boys in their squad were ogling her that summer, but she had eyes only for Boggs.

He'd fallen hard. They'd married young. They'd had five years before the pox took her. They'd had Drew.

The girl on the television had the same look on her face as she crouched over the dying boy that Halla had in the hospital, holding Drew: the fragility and resilience, together. It made you want to help her, and it made you proud when she helped herself. Boggs couldn't keep from rooting for her, and like everyone else in Panem, he couldn't look away. He stole every moment he could to watch her.

When she won and brought the boy home with her, there was talk of bringing her to 13. Making her act of rebellion (for that was what it was, whether intentional or not) a rallying point. When the Quarter Quell was announced, the talk solidified into a plan of action. Nearly all of the tributes had a part in it, along with their mentors and one, very highly-placed Gamemaker, no one knew exactly who.

Boggs was in the thick of it. Drew barely saw him that summer as they sat in Command, planning for the rescue. Boggs let his anger carry him, onto the hovercraft and across the darkened skies of Panem, into the Capitol itself.

He was watching with anger and vengeance in his heart as the girl brought it all down, with one arrow.

...

He lost his anger, the first time he saw her in person.

She was smaller than she'd looked on the television. Short and slight, she lay unconscious, bleeding and broken, for almost a full day after her rescue, sleeping curled up on her side, barely making a dent in the bed.

Later, awake, her eyes were haunted, confused, exhausted. Staggering through the hovercraft, and then the hospital wing back in 13.

_She's just a girl_, he'd thought, stunned. _ Just a kid_. All the fight went out of Boggs. He was completely unmanned, watching this little girl on whom everyone, and Coin especially, had pinned all the hopes of the revolution. This little girl who'd already gone through so much...and so much more was still expected of her.

What if it had happened to Halla? he thought. What if they'd been born in 12, instead of 13, the two of them? Would he have volunteered, in place of Porter? Would Porter, in place of him? Would he have been able to survive, to kill other children...children like the ones he trained now, to kill? Would Halla have been able to do it?

What if it had been Drew? Drew's name called out, Drew whisked away and fitted with weapons and prettied up, only to be killed by some other child.

He understands, for the first time. The horror, and the numbness that comes with too much horror. And the remarkable nature of the boy's love for the girl, in the middle of all that.

He understands what they are fighting for.

And he knows with certainty that Coin doesn't.

...

"I told you we should have rescued the boy first."

Coin's remark, like all of Coin's remarks, is precisely calculated, aimed and deployed when and where it wil do the most damage. In this case, it is jabbed like a sword at the back of the retreating girl. Boggs feels a stab of pain on her behalf, and catches sight of her crumpled face as the door closes, turned back for an instant at Coin's cruel words.

The door latch clicks and the corners of Coin's thin lips curl up in a wry smile. She knows she's hit the girl precisely at the heart of her guilt. Motivating her, Coin thinks.

Allowing the girl's trip back to 12 is another tactic of Coin's: motivation by carnage. It was discussed in Command before the girl arrived today. Let her go back and see the ashes of her home, let her see a few bones, a few of her old playmates' houses burnt. That will light a fire under her.

Boggs watches the oily sheen of Coin's hair, draped like a curtain around an angular face, hiding the pale eyes that have never once flickered with warmth. 13 is a cold and harsh place, bringing out the best and warmest instincts in some (he thinks of Halla), the worst and most heartless in others.

Coin's pale eyes flick onto Boggs, and she asks whether he thinks a few more strategically-placed skulls in the walking paths will have a greater emotional impact on the girl? Or might that be enough to instead throw her over the edge into madness? She stares him down, waits for his response. There is nothing behind those eyes.

That is the moment Boggs really begins to hate her.

...

When the girl gets her first glimpse at the boy on that national broadcast with Ceasar Flickerman, when she touches the screen and then lets her hand drop, hopeless...

Boggs' heart is in his throat along with her. He knows even better than she does, he thinks, what lies in store for the boy the moment the cameras are off. They have kept him pretty for this long precisely so he could be seen by all of Panem as firmly aligned with the Capitol, and now that he has said his lines (and who knows what they promised him, in exchange for his traitorous words?), they will take him away and begin the real work of breaking him.

The girl pushes past several people on her way out of Command; she scowls as Coin calls after her.

Without thinking about it, Boggs reaches out, touches her arm in passing.

It's so small; he could close his hand around her whole upper arm. And she's trembling and warm and sweaty, and just wants to leave, to process what she's just seen. Boggs doesn't really know what he intended by stopping her, but he doesn't get a chance to figure it out, because her friend Gale is on him immediately, pushing him roughly back. His elbow catches the boy's nose and several soldiers close in to haul the boy off.

The girl makes her escape, Boggs just catching sight of her shadow as she flits down the hallway. He does not order her back, no matter what Coin may say. His allegiance is no longer to Coin.

...

She is so broken, they will not let her fight. But they have given her a squad nevertheless. Boggs will let her serve under no one but him. The cameras he will tolerate, for her.

He kisses Drew goodbye the morning they leave on the train for the Capitol. Halla's brown eyes look solemnly back at him from his son's face, already leaving behind the chubbiness of babyhood. Someday, that sweet pockmarked face will belong to a man...a man Boggs will never know.

He knows he's not coming back.

For her, he will go and fight and die. He will protect her as the boy no longer can, because in the end, she will not follow Coin and her cold ways. There is enough warmth in her to melt a glacier. To lift others up in courage, loyalty and love.

Always love.

...

_Halla_, he thinks, in the moments before death, as his lifeblood drains away and the girl's face grows hazy before him. _ I'm coming._


	5. Drawing the Bow

Hello, my little band of followers :) We are small but we are mighty...

**Drawing the Bow** _**From the Pre-Draw position, use the back muscles to pull the elbow of the drawing arm backwards in one smooth motion until the drawing hand is placed against the jaw...An equal amount of push on the bow hand and pull on the drawing hand will keep the body balanced**_**. -****Graeme Jeffrey Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008**

Somewhere in the twilight haze beween sleeping and waking, Haymitch realizes that the pattering on his bedroom window is not, in fact, rain or hail. Rain or hail would have been just fine. No one is expected to get out of bed for rain or hail. Drunkards such as himself, in fact, are expected to remain pretty much comatose during rain or hail.

For spatters of tiny pebbles being lobbed against the glass, though, one is expected to rise.

"...the fuck?" He's always been one to defy expectations. Even ones as reasonable as these. Especially ones as reasonable as these. He burrows his nose into the sour pillowcase and pulls the thin blanket over his head.

"Uncle Haymitch..." The thin blanket does nothing to shut out the voices. "Uncle Haymitch!" Reedy, shrill voices. Children's voices. Today, of all days. "Open up!"

He grabs the blanket between two toes and flips it off the bed in one swift movement. He lifts his head and points his eyes, still closed, in the general direction of the window. The sunlight is too bright even through his closed lids, and he shades them with splayed fingers. Peeking between his thumb and forefinger, he's just in time to see another spray of pebbles hit the cracked-open window, a few making their way inside and onto the floor.

The girl's a good shot, he'll give her that. And judging from the respectable little pile of stones collected under his window, she's been trying to wake him for quite a while.

Groaning, he pushes himself upright and off of the bed, making for the window with what can only be called a lurch. He grabs the sash and yanks it up just as another handful of tiny rocks sails through the window.

He gets a mouthful.

"Goddamnit. Arrrrrgh..." Rubbing one's face vigorously when one has just been pelted with small rocks is not a good idea. Not at all.

She's not even sorry. Squinting out into the obnoxiously bright sunlit summer morning, he sees her directly below, scowling up at him with her arms crossed, leaning back with her weight on one leg: that quintessentially female mannerism she's adopted lately. The boy's with her, hanging back a little, his blonde head swiveling between his sister and his "uncle," every tensed muscle in his body screaming This Is Not a Good Idea. But he'll follow Prue anywhere, and this morning, Anywhere happens to be Uncle Haymitch's back window. For whatever reason.

"Whatime is it?" He's still slurring a little.

"Seven thirty."

"The hell do you want so early?"

She blinks at him a few times. "Breakfast."

His mouth pops open and he stares at her; she defies him with her eyes, blue and clear. Motionless; her mom must have taught her the secrets of not backing down when you have your prey in the crosshairs.

"Fuck this," he mutters. He turns back to his bed, getting a sharp stone lodged in the soft fleshy part of his heel. He falls face-first back onto his bed, grabs the pillow and stuffs it over his head.

There is a muttered discussion outside the window. Then, very clearly, he hears the girl's voice. "Okay, Sagey," she says, more loudly than she needs to, clearly intending Haymitch to hear every word. "Go ahead. Sing it."

_Dear god_, he has time to think, before the boy draws an ostentatiously deep breath, and begins to sing. "_99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beeeeeer_..."

There are many complimentary things that could be said about 8 year old Sage Mellark, his young neighbor. The boy has the makings of a fine athlete. A quiet thoughtfulness that his sister sometimes lacks. A keen intellectual intelligence. He's a passable marksman, a respectable artist. Possessed of a warm and loyal heart.

One thing you cannot, just canNOT be complimentary about is his singing voice.

The boy is tone deaf as a rock. Has an ear made not so much of tin, as of pure titanium. Couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. Say it however you like: the boy can't sing.

And his sister knows it.

"_You take one down, pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall."_

This wouldn't sting quite so much if Haymitch hadn't been the one to teach the boy the song. Indeed, he'd made a point of saying that it was meant to be sung at the top of one's lungs. The target having been a certain pair of lovebirds next door who liked to wake up with the sun. And wake him up as well. He'd encouraged their son to wake them instead with this...this...

_"98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beeeeeeeeer_..."

The boy's voice cracks on the long note, and Haymitch can't take it any more. He rolls onto his back, dropping the pillow.

"_You take one down, pass it around, 97 bottles of beer-"_

Haymitch launches himself off the bed and grips the windowsill, glowering down at the kids and making the boy's voice die off mercifully. He takes a deep breath of his own and holds it for a moment, really wanting to work up a head of steam for this one. "Why don't you make your breakfast in your OWN DAMN KITCHEN."

He grips the window sash and gets ready to slam it down, not really caring if the glass breaks. As long as they leave him alone.

He's stopped by a small voice, one that's lost all its stridency. "We can't," the girl says.

He sags, taking in the two kids below. _They're still in their nightclothes_, he thinks, the girl in a blue tank top and soft fuzzy pants that drag along the ground, the boy in a long, dirty-looking white T shirt and sweatpants. Her hair is loose, mussed and ratty-looking, like she hasn't washed it in too long. The boy is clinging to one of her hands now, frowning at the grass beneath his bare feet.

"Oh," Haymitch says. He backs away from the window, embedding more tiny pebbles in the soles of his own bare feet. "Goddamnit..."

He pads down the stairs and unlocks the back door for them, barely pausing on his way to the downstairs bathroom. He vomits, then pees, then showers, the hot spray reviving him over a period of a half hour or longer. He dries himself with, and then dons, a nondescript-colored robe which is none too clean, but it gets the job done. "The job" being to make him decent enough to be presentable to the tender eyes of children, but comfortable enough to fall back into bed again after they've gone home.

When he makes it back out to the kitchen, the boy is sitting cross-legged on top of the table, munching his way through a jar of stale cookies he'd forgotten he had. The girl is standing at the stove, wearing an apron (_where'd she find an apron?), _flipping a couple of fried eggs with a spatula in one hand and mixing some batter for french toast with a spoon in the other hand. She drops the spoon to rummage among his paltry collection of dried herbs, somehow coming up with handfuls of a few different things she can fling in with the eggs. She doesn't turn around or acknowledge him, only continues filling his kitchen with smells so delicious that he's almost not mad any more.

Almost.

He addresses the boy first. "Didn't your mom ever teach you to sit in a chair, like a human being?"

The boy raises his eyebrows and fixes his uncle with a gray deadpan stare that's so much the twin of his mother's, Haymitch finds himself fighting back a smile. "All your chairs are sticky," the kid says.

Haymitch lets out a chuckle, followed immediately by a frown. _Angry, damnit. You're angry_.

"You don't live like a human being. Why should we?" The girl's words are clipped and pointed. If Haymitch is no longer angry, she sure is. And it's not at him.

She flips the eggs onto a plate, drops the spoon again and grabs a knife to begin slicing the loaf of bread her dad delivered yesterday. She lops off three or four thick slices, coats them in the batter and then throws them in the pan, poking at them with the spatula until she's got them all in position.

She's barely tall enough to operate the stove, and she could run her own restaurant, he thinks, with something bordering on pride.

"What happened, Blueberry?" he asks, softly.

She doesn't give him an answer, and he doesn't expect one, until she's through at the stove. She carries a steaming plate of eggs and toast to the table, and Sage scrambles off of it immediately, brushing the cookie crumbs from the front of his T shirt. "Sagey, could you go grab some towels from the bathroom, so we can sit down?"

He runs off.

Haymitch shuffles over to the cabinet and pulls out three plates. "So?"

Prue sighs and sets the plate down on the filthy table. It's a long, heavy sigh, and no one her age should have cause to make a sound even remotely like that, he thinks. Not any more. She chews on her lip. "Dad."

Haymitch lowers himself into one of the sticky chairs. "Again?"

"Yup. Second time this week." She finally meets his eyes. He could lose himself in those pools of blueberry-blue. But they're so, so sad. "Sagey went downstairs first. And it was quiet for a while, and then I heard a dish break, and...well..."

Haymitch nods. "Okay."

"And when I got downstairs, Dad was standing there, kind of leaning over and grabbing a chair. Really hard. And Sagey was standing right in front of him, trying to get his attention, because he doesn't understand, you know? He's just a kid." She's rambling, but he lets her, because she needs to get it out. "And Dad was...he was shaking, you know? He was trying not to...go at Sagey. And he didn't realize it, he just kept saying 'Look at me Dad, please look at me...'"

"And?"

She shrugs. "And so I grabbed him. And ran." She lets out a shaky breath. "Dad looked like he was going to wreck that chair. His eyes were squeezed shut." She pauses, then moves off to open a drawer, and begins piling silverware into her open hand. "He hasn't had one that bad in a long time."

"Listen," he tells her, and she does. She places the silverware on the table and meets his eyes again. He runs a hand through his grey hair. "He has never hurt any of you during these things. And he never will. He'd off himself before he hurt you."

"I know. I know that! I just..." She twisting her hands around one another now, and he really wants to grab them and squeeze, and maybe pull her in for a hug. But that's not what you do with Prue. "I just didn't want him to _say_ anything. He _says_ things sometimes when..."

Sage comes trotting back into the kitchen. "I couldn't find any clean towels."

Prue smiles immediately, pulling on a mask of Everything-Is-Okay so quickly that Haymitch takes a few beats to catch up with her.

They eat the excellent breakfast in mostly silence. After, Haymitch asks Sage to go outside and gather his geese into the pen, a Sisyphian task that will keep him busy for a while. He and Prue laugh at the boy for a while from the window over the sink, she up on a stool so she can reach in to scrub the dishes, he drying them beside her.

After about a twenty minutes of watching the geese alternately honk loudly, nip at Sage's fingers and run for the woods, she goes quiet and scowls down into the dirty dishwater.

He has only to wait.

"I hate her sometimes," Prue finally whispers. "I hate her when she does this."

Haymitch doesn't have to wonder for a second who she means. He feels a sinking in his chest, realizing he hasn't seen Katniss outside in several days and kicking himself for not putting 2 and 2 together. _ Too damn drunk_. He backs off and drops into a chair again. "How long?"

"Four days," Prue spits, throwing the dishcloth into the sink with a sudden ferocity. The dirty water splashes up and gets her in the eye, and she swipes at it with the flat of a palm. "She has been in bed four days. She won't even talk to us. It's like she's dead." She pushes back off of the stool, yanking at the knot in back of her apron. "It's like she doesn't even care about us. She doesn't care that Dad has had two...of his things in the last four days, and I've been trying to take care of Sagey and help Dad and get ready for these _people_ who are coming over today..." Her voice is wavering the way it does when she's trying not to cry.

"Blueberry," he says. "Come here and sit down."

"Don't _call_ me that," she says. "I'm not a baby." She yanks at the apron strings, but they've knotted themselves behind her and she's making it worse by pulling them. Which she damn well knows.

"No, you're sure not. Just come here." He holds out his hands. She stalks over to him, her hands stiff in fists by her sides. Turns her back and waits. He grips the knotted string in his hands and begins gently working it free. "Think for a second, will you? What day is it, anyway?"

"Saturday."

"Wiseass." He tugs at the strings a little less gently. "I mean the date. What's the date?"

A pause, and then, in a small voice, she replies, "It's July the fourth."

"July the fourth," he repeats. "Do you know what used to happen on this day, when your folks were young?"

She sighs. "It was the day of the Reaping."

"Yup." He has the first knot free, and is working on the second. "Do you know what that means?"

Another sigh. "Each year, a male and female Tribute would travel from their home district-"

"No." He pulls the strings apart and spins her around to face him, pulling the apron over her head. "I don't want to hear that sterilized crap they teach you in school. I want to know, do you_ really _know what it means?"

She shakes her head, leveling a gaze at him that is more intent and focused than he's seen from many three times her age.

"It meant that two poor, half-starved, scared-shitless kids got their names called over a loudspeaker, got ten minutes to say goodbye to their families, and then got shipped off to the Capitol to most likely die. It happened fast, so fast it almost wasn't real. Unless you happened to be the one whose name got called."

Her eyes are wide and locked on his. She's motionless. Her teachers don't talk this way.

"How old are you this year, Prue?"

His use of her real name has shocked her; she knows he's never liked it.

She blinks at him. "I'm twelve," she breathes.

He nods. "It happened to kids your age." He points off in the general direction of her house. "It happened to both your folks. Twice." He lets his hand drop. "They were made to do some pretty awful stuff, in order to get back home. So was I. So were a lot of kids. Kids _your age_."

Her mouth pops open, but he stops her. "I'm not saying what your mom's doing is right. I'm just telling you..." He leans in. "Do you think there might be a reason that this day in particular, this year in particular, is hard on your folks?"

She nods.

"Do you think you might cut them some slack?"

Another nod.

"Okay." He balls up the apron in one hand and stands abruptly. "Let's go rescue your brother before the geese eat the clothes off his back."

Prue gives him a small smile, but he can tell she's still thinking on what he said from the wrinkled brow that accompanies it. That's fine with him. When people stop thinking about it, really thinking about it, that's when he'll be worried.

"What time are these guests coming, anyway?"

Prue wrinkles her nose. "Four. We're supposed to meet the train and then take them to the guest house..."

"Who all's coming?"

"Annie ODair and her son."

He grins. "Ah, the handsome playboy. I remember the lad well..."

Another wrinkled nose. "He's not_ that _handsome. Besides, he's getting married, so he can't be a playboy any more."

"One would think."

Prue spots her brother over by the treeline and shouts with a sly smile, "Hey Sagey! How about another chorus of _99 Bottles_?"

_There she is_, he thinks, watching her face crinkle into that familiar laugh. That smile is never far away. And that is the difference between Prue and her mother. This girl is everything Katniss was, and wasn't: the sorrow _and_ the joy. The push and the pull, the problem and the solution, all in one.

He loves her completely, this daunting woman-child. Loves her so much it scares the shit out of him.

He guesses her parents feel about the same.

...

The room is dark and musty and the sheets smell of sweat, but Prue doesn't care. She slips between the sheets and wraps her arms around her still and silent mother.

"Mama, I love you." She says it into her mother's right ear, the Real ear.

For the first time in four days, there is movement. Mama turns her head. She speaks so softly that Prue wouldn't be able to hear if she wasn't so close. "I love you too."

Prue lets her tears fall onto her mother's cheek. "I missed you. Mama, I missed you."

Mama sits up and cradles Prue's jaw with her two hands. "I'm sorry I went away...I'm so sorry, Little Bird."

"No, Mama. I'm sorry I was mad."

"Is everything good?"

A pause. Then, "Yes. Everything's good."

There are some things mothers don't need to know.


	6. The Anchor

A/N Childbirth, y'all. If it makes you squeamish, you MIGHT want to skip this one.

Step 6: **The Anchor** _**The Anchor is where the hand is positioned on the jaw and the bowstring touches the face. It is vitally important that the index finger is firmly placed against the jaw, the thumb is tucked into the palm of the hand so it can be placed firmly against the neck and the bowstring is firmly touching the chin (and nose, if possible.) The relationship between all these positions is important as it acts as the rear sight, so it is vital that it be as consistent as possible. It also acts as a consistent draw length position. Any variation in the position will effect the amount of force the bow will impart to the arrow. **_**-****Graeme Jeffrey Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008**

My water breaks on a Friday morning.

I haven't slept properly in months; the insomnia of pregnancy combined with the general discomfort of being 30 pounds heavier than I'm used to, in addition to being completely terrified every moment of every day since I first felt this baby move, have all combined to steal my sleep. Everyone I meet advises me to "sleep now, because once the baby comes, you'll never sleep again!"

I'm not amused.

Knowing the level of my exhaustion, Peeta must have let me sleep in when he slipped off to the bakery before dawn. When I finally open my eyes, he's gone and the winter sunlight is slanting through the windows and onto the floor at much too steep an angle. I remember falling into bed around 3AM, and realize I must have slept for five or six hours straight, for the first time in months.

I stretch my arms above my head and attempt to roll onto my back before I remember..._ouch_. The familiar pinch in my lower back makes me groan in frustration. I heave back onto my left side and stretch my legs, pointing and flexing my toes, wincing at the pins and needles the swelling has produced. I feel the familiar ache of a cramp in my right calf, and flex that foot as far back as it will go, wishing I could reach down and massage the muscle, knowing that my belly will prevent it.

I close my eyes and wiggle to the edge of the bed, then heave myself off, finding the cold floor with my swollen feet. I push my upper body off the bed with my arms; standing straight, I raise them above my head and open my mouth for a jaw-cracking yawn. I feel rested, refreshed, renewed-

I feel a muted pop, and a sudden warm gush that bursts down my legs and soaks first my wool socks, and then the carpet beneath them.

There's a lot of water. A lot.

...

_Breathe. Breathe. That was your water breaking_.

I don't know where the voice is coming from, but it's a good voice. I'm going to allow it, for now.

24 hours. That's what Mom said. It shouldn't be more than 24 hours from the time the water breaks to the time the baby is born. But don't worry, she'd said over the phone. If you're anything like me, your water won't break until you're pushing.

I think we've established I'm nothing like her.

_Walk_, the voice says. _Walking will bring the pains on._

Great. I'll walk. I step gingerly away from the wet spot on the carpet, my socks squelching as I put first one foot down, then the other. No more warm liquid, so far. I reach down and peel off my wet socks. Then I shimmy out of my sweatpants, ball everything up into a soggy knot and pad into the bathroom, tossing them into the hamper. I grab a towel and waddle back into the bedroom, and spend the next few minutes rubbing at the carpet, getting rid of the evidence. I throw the towel in the hamper, too, then turn to the mirror above the sink.

I'm pale, my face wide and pasty, my thighs flabby where they peek out under the bottom of my sleep shirt. My eyes are round and staring.

I'll walk, but first, I'll shower.

...

I feel another small burst of water as I'm stepping out of the shower. I curse softly, and dab it off of my legs with a towel, and then I get dressed. I'm very conscious of what I'm putting on, for some reason. Black courderoys and my favorite green sweater. More wool socks. The rest is downstairs.

I stop halfway down the stairway, looking around our home. Ours. The two of us, fifteen years; ours. At this time tomorrow, the baby could be here.

He could be here, tomorrow. Our son.

As though he can hear my thoughts, the baby gives a lazy push from inside me; my belly swells and shifts under my sweater.

I grip the railing and sit on a stair, as the sudden faintness takes hold of me, black pinpricks making their way inward from the edges of my vision. I rest my forehead against the cool banister and squeeze my eyes shut, willing the dizziness and nausea and terror to pass. I have to walk now. Have to. I concentrate on my breathing. In. Out. In.

It passes, and I open my eyes, stand, and check my watch. _Shit. _It's been an hour, a whole hour since I got up. Shouldn't the pains have started already? Didn't Mom say that once your water is broken, the pains usually start right away, or if they've already started, they get worse? I close my eyes again and try to feel something, anything.

All I feel is the baby poking my side and my feet swelling.

I make my slow, ponderous way down the stairs and into the front hall. I swathe myself in winter coat, boots, scarf, gloves. I open the door to a blast of frigid air and blinding sunlight on snow.

I let my eyes stray longingly toward the woods. My woods. Still mine, today. I could-

_No. That would be just about the stupidest thing you've ever done. And that's saying something_.

Okay, voice. That's getting personal. Still, it's right.

So. The bakery, it is.

...

It's a long trip into town, what with the slippery sidewalks and the people wanting to stop and chat, and the humongous effing stomach throwing me off balance.

And what with having to stop three times for little bursts of water coming out of me.

Luckily, I'm wearing a bleeding cloth, and also luckily, there doesn't seem to be as much water any more. Maybe it will stop. Maybe this isn't it. Maybe-

_Maybe you should concentrate on walking_.

Shut up, voice. In case you haven't noticed, walking isn't helping.

...

"Hey!" His voice is warm and welcoming as always, and his face lights up when he sees me at the door, stamping my feet on the mat to dislodge the snow from my boots. His bakery smells like warmth and yeast and sugar, and him. It smells like home.

The baby rolls over inside me as Peeta jogs across the front room of the bakery toward me, slipping a little as his false leg hits a wet patch where another customer stood. My hand strays unconsciously to my belly, smoothing over the place where I felt the movement, and then skates just as quickly away to smooth my hair where it's escaped from the braid.

Peeta skids to a stop and plants a wet kiss on the corner of my mouth, resting his hand on top of the belly, just briefly, but much more easily than I did. He removes his hand quickly, because he knows it makes me jumpy, when people touch it. Him. Touch him.

"Did you walk all the way here?" He's frowning.

"Yes. I am capable of walking." I unwind the scarf, shrug out of the coat. I'm too hot, suddenly.

"Yeah, but..." He snakes a hand around my shoulders, and I tense up, and then relax. Quick, and quick. "It's really slippery. I mean, it's still below freezing out there..."

"I know that." I'm snapping, being unreasonable. "Can I sit now?"

"Yeah! Of course. Here..." And he's walking me over to one of the small tables, pulling out a chair for me. Helping me prop my feet up on a second chair.

Bringing me a cheese bun.

I could live a thousand years, and never deserve him.

I decide not to tell him. Not just yet. I'm just going to...wait.

_Katniss_.

Shut up, voice.

...

We have a late dinner that night, and by the time we're finished eating, washing the dishes and heading up the stairs, it's been twelve hours since my water broke. And...nothing. I haven't felt anything.

I don't know if this means something is wrong. I don't know what to think. But I still haven't told him.

Once we enter the bedroom, though, the gig is up. On the way to the bathroom, his eyes zero in on the area of the floor that I'd wiped at, hoping to conceal evidence. Apparently I did a crappy job, because he looks down at the dark patch of stiffened carpet, and then up at me, and I instantly know that He Knows.

"What happened there?" He tries to sound so nonchalant.

"Oh...I knocked over a glass of water."

"Uh-huh." He steps closer and reaches for my hand, but I turn away toward the window, wrapping my arms around my chest. The baby shifts inside me again, and I stifle a sob into my fist. "Did your water break?"

I should have known he'd realize. As soon as I'd realized I was pregnant, he'd been so giddy about it that he'd immediately read everything he could get his hands on relating to the subject. He'd known about most of my symptoms before I did.

I peek at him over my shoulder. "Just a little."

"Hon. How long ago?"

"Uh...this morning sometime?" I look back out the window. I am absolutely not going to cry.

He's silent for too long, and when I finally glance back at him again, he's grinning so hard I think his face might split open. He bites his lip. "So this is it?" he squeaks, his voice breaking like an adolescent.

I draw in a sharp breath and turn away, but I can't stifle the sobs that make their way up through my throat. I can only splutter out into the cold night.

He's at my side in an instant, his warm hands closing over my shoulders. "Hey, hey, hey." He buries his mouth in my throat, and I lean into him, still gasping silently. "You're going to be fine. _She's _going to be fine." His hand strays down to my midsection and dips under my sweater; he runs his fingertips over the taut skin of my abdomen.

"_He_," I correct. I move away, leaving Peeta holding air. "I'm going to take a bath," I say.

"Okay...do you need anything?"

"No, just...I need to..." I can't finish. I stalk away from him and shut the bathroom door, leaning back against it and trying to hold in my sobs. I don't know what I need, except for this not to be happening, for this not to be real. This was a mistake. I don't want it; I don't want him to come.

_A bit late for that, isn't it?_

Shut _up_, voice.

...

The pains start around noon on Saturday, and at first I think I'm going to be okay. The first one starts as a hot pinprick of pain, like bad gas, somewhere between my pubic bone and my navel, and spreads out and around, getting stronger and stronger and then fading away as gradually as it came. It feels like a bad menstrual cramp.

I'm sitting at the table, eating lunch, and Peeta catches me frowning down into my soup, my spoon frozen halfway to my mouth. He watches me carefully until I move again, and then lowers his own spoon, raising his eyebrows in a silent question.

I get up and walk over to the window, staring out at my woods. There is no more fence. I could go out there, right now. I could run...walk...waddle away.

I get my breathing under control. Peeta doesn't speak, just silently piles the dishes in the sink and then grabs our coats from the front closet. He lays them on the bench by the front door, along with the bag I've had packed for weeks now. The overnight bag. For the clinic.

White coats. Doctors. Medicine. _No._

The next pain doesn't come for 20 minutes, and then the next, half an hour later. This is fine. This is good. I can do this. As long as it stays like this, I'm fine.

I pace the hallways. I don't let him touch me, and I don't stop moving. He does not suggest leaving, just brings me glasses of water, sandwiches, cookies periodically. Every 15 to 20 minutes, I pause. Then every 10 minutes. The house is silent. The hours tick down.

I can do this.

...

I can't do this.

They are coming more frequently now, and instead of a pinprick, they start as the hot stick of a nail...a bolt...a screw driving into me below the navel, the pain radiating outward and upward and around to my back.

It's 9 PM, and I'm kneeling on the floor, leaning forward over our living room couch, my face pressed into one of the couch cushions. It's completely black outside and a light snow has been falling for a few hours now. I haven't made a sound. Peeta is somewhere in the room, every time I come up for air he's speaking to me from a different place, suggesting that it's really time that we left, we should get to the clinic, I should at least let him call them.

I shake my head furiously as the pain builds and builds and builds. I breathe long and slow. It doesn't help. I sway my body from side to side. It doesn't help. I bite my lip and dig my fingernails into my own palms, and nothing helps. I don't want to go. If anyone touches me now I'll die. Especially a doctor. With a needle. The glint of steel in my arm, the twist of a knife as the tracker is dug out again. No. No.

It builds until it lets me go, lets me rest and slump against the couch and raise my eyes just enough to make out the grain of the fabric, green and blue woven tightly. It'll be back in a few minutes to grip me again and Peeta's talking behind me again and I. Can't. Do. This.

The doorbell rings during one of the lulls between contractions, and my head pops up so fast I see stars. I hear Peeta's relieved outrush of breath behind me, and then his loud, uneven footsteps as he half-runs to open the door. I have never found his clumsiness more hateful.

The door opens and I'm treated to a blast of chilly air and a swirl of snowflakes, and just as the next bolt of pain grips me, I see the figure at the door and I finally, finally let out a long groan. A wail. The person at the door is tall, blonde, slight yet sturdy. She carries a black doctor's bag in one hand and her overnight case in the other. She looks like she left 4 in a hurry.

She looks like Prim might have looked some day, had she lived, and become a doctor.

My mother nods at Peeta and strides into the house, kneeling down beside me without even taking off her coat. "How long has it been since they started?"

I narrow my eyes and glare at my husband, who's watching me like I might explode. I just might. "You called...my mother?" I ask through gritted teeth. I'm in the midst of the worst of the pain, but I keep my eyes open this time.

He nods. "I called her while you were in the bath last night. Listen..."

"I told you. I didn't. Want her. Here."

He shakes his head and opens his mouth to explain, but my mother interrupts him. "He told me you weren't very keen on going to the clinic. It was my idea to come."

It ends, and I slump against the couch. I think I may cry, now. The one person I didn't want to see.

"Can you flip over onto your back? Just get on the couch? I want to see how far along you are, and then I won't check you again."

I'm too dazed not to do what she says. I maneuver onto the couch, and my mother takes up my former position on the carpet. I see her frown as her knees hit the pool of dampness I've left in my wake. "You're leaking a lot of fluid...have you been drinking water?"

"Yeah."

"Good." She slips on a glove, tells me to take a deep breath and blow it out slowly...and then...

"_Mom_."

"Hold on." She's frowning again. "Okay. You're about five. That's halfway there, honey."

I blink a few times. "That's_ it_?" Halfway there. Oh god. I can't do this.

My mother snaps into action. I've seen it a million times. "The first part takes the longest," she tells me. "Peeta, honey, can you go upstairs and draw a bath? We may need it later." He bolts up the stairs and she turns back to me. "If we're not going to the clinic, we need to get you upstairs. Unless you want to replace this rug."

"You're not going to make me go?"

"No..." She won't look me in the eye, but still, I see the fleeting look of pain flash across her face. "I think you've earned the right to be wherever you want to be." She smoothes the hair off my forehead. "But you do need to tell me where you keep your bedsheets."

Another pain is starting, and I roll onto my side. I don't realize I'm crying until my mom starts smoothing away the tears with the flat of her palm. "How much longer?" I croak, when I can talk again.

She smiles, but it's tight around the edges. "I don't know. But I do know..." And she grips my chin between her thumb and forefinger. "...that you're going to be fine." She squeezes my shoulder, then slides her hand down to grip my elbow and help me up. And, unbelievably, I'm on my feet.

And unbelievably, it feels good. The goddamn voice was right; I just need to walk.

I haven't seen my mother in fifteen years, but she's the same, and I'm the same, and we've snapped back to where we left off.

Except now, I'm having a baby.

...

It's 3 AM. That's what they tell me. If time had any meaning at all any more.

There are no more bolts or screws. They are a memory. They belong to another world. Now, there is a pickaxe with a burning tip that spears my midsection, gripping out and around and everywhere. The whole world.

Over and over.

There is no one else. There is no Mom. No one outside this room. I know Peeta is here, or at least his hands are. I remember saying his name at one point, asking for him, and I saw his hands and grabbed them tight. And now every time I feel the pain coming, I crush our intertwined hands into my forehead as hard, as hard, as hard as I can.

I don't know if I make a sound. I don't care.

Around the time I asked for Peeta, I heard them talking, standing in some vague location behind me and talking...about an IV.

I tell them No. No. No needles, no wires. No...I don't know how many times I say it. I don't care. I tell them I'll rip it out if they try it.

And then the pain comes again, and there is nothing. Nothing except me and the bed, and the knot of our hands slick with sweat from my shivering.

I think I may die.

I think I may want to.

...

Dawn.

I can't...I can't.

The pillow is wet.

Every time my body is gripped now, it spins out of my control. It is possessed. It is wracked in half and I can't breathe as I am forced to bear down...bear down. Pushing down makes the pain slack off, and that's all my body needs to know, to force me to do it. Again and again.

I am completely...I am beyond control. I feel it coming and I think I am making some kind of...I hear a growling, groaning, sickeningly muffled scream, and I think it's me, but I'm not sure and I really don't care anyway.

Again. Pain. Pushing. I'm on my side and I feel my body curling, my back arching against my will, and I'm completely. Terrified.

"Katniss." It's my mom. I turn my head, growl at her, and it turns into a sob. "Honey, I'm going to give you something for the pain."

"Nooooo." I force it out through gritted teeth. I grind those knuckles into my forehead.

"Listen." I feel her hand in my hair, damp with sweat. "There may be a problem. I may have to...I know you said you didn't want an IV. But honey...we want the baby to make it through this. Okay?"

My eyes snap open and Peeta's face is right there.

He's crying.

My heart flies into a thousand pieces. Flies right out of my body and into our clasped hands.

"Please," he whispers. "Katniss...let her help you. Please."

I can do this. For him, I can do this. "Okay." I nod my head. "Okay."

My mom flies into action again. After the next contraction she has me sit up. Which hurts more than anything. She spreads some cool gel-like stuff onto my back, and then there is a sharp stabbing that feels like it's going right through my spine, and I cry out like I've been shot. She lays the flat of her palm on my arm. "Almost done," she says. There's no more pain after that, just her fiddling about behind me.

She lets me lie back down again. "You'll still feel the next few," she says. "But they're going to start to slack off."

"I'll believe it when I see it," I say, curling up on my side again. "Oh no..."

And just like that, I'm gripped by pain again. But this time...

There's no flying out of control. No unbearable urge to bear down. It hurts, but I'm still here. In the room. I look at Peeta, and he's watching me, eyes wide and mouth open, poised to grab my hands again if I need him.

But...I'm okay.

After it's over, my mom checks me again and tells me with a frown that I'm still only an eight. "A few more hours to go, maybe." I could care less.

"What is this stuff?" I ask her.

"It's from the Capitol. The bastards have had this technique for pain relief for a hundred years and they chose not to share it with the districts. Don't get me started."

I wait through another contraction, which I find quite...reasonably...painful.

She bustles around the room, which is becoming brighter by the second with the pale light of a winter morning. There's snow on the windowsill.

"Why...didn't I let you give this to me before?" I whisper.

She laughs, and Peeta laughs, and I laugh, even, through my fatigue, even as my eyes fight to close. "I have no idea," she says, "...but if they'd had this around when I was having you and your sister, I'd have taken it in a second." She lays her hand on my arm and slips her fingers onto my wrist, taking my pulse.

Then she pats my hand. "You have a temperature, honey. Your water has been broken for almost 48 hours now, and I'm afraid infection might set in."

Fear. "Will it hurt...the baby?"

"Not if I get some antibiotics into you very soon."

She slides a needle painlessly into my arm and hangs a bag of fluids, and another of medicine, from the bedpost.

I don't feel any more contractions. Not one. I can't feel my legs, either, but right now I. Don't. Care.

My mom leaves me to rest for a while, with instructions to send for her if I start to feel "pressure," whatever that means. I don't care right now.

She'll be back every 15 minutes or so, she says.

Peeta crawls into bed with me, his face tired and relieved and about ten years older than he looked yesterday.

I become aware that I'm stark naked and a little cold. Peeta inches a blanket around us, maneuvering it carefully around the tubing snaking out of my arm.

I fall asleep almost immediately.

...

Mid-morning.

"Peeta." I shake him. He's drooling on the pillow. "Wake up."

"Huh?"

"You need to go get my mom."

...

"This isn't going to take much work at all," my mom tells me.

"How can you tell?"

"She has lots of dark hair," Mom tells me. "Just like you did when you were born."

Holy shit.

"You can...see her?" Peeta sputters.

"Her?" I ask him.

"Yes." My mom motions with her hand, beckoning him over to the foot of the bed. She looks up at me. "Want me to get a mirror so you can see too?"

I stare at her. "No. No thanks."

Peeta looks. His eyes go wide as saucers. "Oh...my god." It's a whisper. "I see her."

"You're both so sure it's a girl?"

They just smile at each other. It pisses me off, because...I _know_ this baby is a boy. I've known forever. I can only picture a baby that looks like Peeta; that's all I've ever seen in my mind.

I'll just have to prove them wrong.

I get ready to push.

...

It doesn't hurt, but I can still feel it happening.

One last time...one last time...

And then...

There is a tiny, wet, wriggling person on my chest.

"Oh," I gasp.

My hands go to her. _ Her_. "...girl," my mother says, grinning like a fool, from somewhere far away. Peeta is laughing. Crying. The baby's mouth is strained open, her loud, piercing cries carrying far, filling the house, filling the world. Filling me. With...

My hands cradle her. I hold her.

I crane my neck. I need to see her face.

Her eyes open.

"Oh," I say again. It's a whisper. It's just me and her, my baby, my daughter.

"It's you."


	7. Holding

**A/N This is a one-shot for the purposes of this exercise...but I think I want to expand this to multiple chapters. I have PLANS for these two. Let me know what you think.**

Step 7: Holding

_**When the bow is held in the correct vertical position, then the bowstring and edge of the bow will be parallel. If it is not, then the bow is tilted away from vertical. **_**Graeme Jeffrey Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008****  
**

They called her Merry, once.

And why not? Though life cannot be easy for anyone in 12, it may have been easier for her than most. She has never wanted for food; her mother is a known and skilled healer and is paid well, in money and other useful things, for her work. Her father is the town apothecary, as his father was the town apothecary, taking shipments from the Capitol off of the trains and doing business with the physicians and buying certain plants (blue cohosh...tansy root) in secret, picked from the forbidden woods and sold, also in secret, by her mother, to people desperate enough to make it worth her while, despite the danger.

Merry has always been beautiful. She has always been treated with that slight indulgence, deference even, afforded to the very attractive: skipped to the head of the line in exchange for a smile, treated to the best bread at the baker's, the best meat at the butcher's, the prettiest cloth at the milliner's store.

She has lived her life in a haze of beauty and protection. She and her two best friends Maysilee and Maryan (the mayor's daughters) go to their sixth Reaping knowing, with their brains, that it is possible they will be chosen. Six slips of paper, out of hundreds.

Knowing with their brains, but not in their hearts.

They stand there hand in hand, in the very heart of the seventeen-year-old section of the crowd, and wait for the four names (_four names this year_!) to pass the lips of the blithe Capitol servant before them. Maysilee, Maryan and Merry, blonde and rosy-cheeked, well-fed town girls, dressed in their best clothes, who know they are supposed to hate Berenice, the woman from the Capitol in the shiny silver, form-fitting dress and impossibly high heels, but secretly admire her clothes and her fancy speech and her style.

First comes Daisy Riggs, a fifteen-year-old from the Seam, a little slip of a thing with hollowed cheeks and huge eyes and legs like sticks. The three friends watch her sympathetically as she makes her way up to the stage, shaking and sweating, but their hearts are not touched. They have never sweated, never shaken.

Until now. Because the next name called is Maysilee Donner.

The girl herself nearly collapses with the shock of it. There are cries from the sidelines, from Maysilee's relatives probably, but it's impossible for Merry to tell. She is using all her efforts to keep Maysilee herself upright. She should, she knows, be offering words of encouragement, but all she can manage is, "May...Maysilee." Maysilee turns her head and her eyes are empty, in shock. She turns to her sister, supporting her on her other side, reaches up and kisses her once on the cheek. Maryan begins to sob. The three of them fall together in a clenching embrace (_This is not happening...this cannot be happening_), and then Maysilee breaks away and is gone, walking. Maryan grabs Merry's hand and Merry can hardly hold onto her, Maryan is sobbing so hard.

Two more names are called, the boys, Dug Brace and Haymitch Abernathy, both from the Seam. Merry knows neither of them. She can't take her eyes off of her friend, standing straight and tall on the stage, and then turning her back and walking into the Justice Building. Maysilee's parents rushing in after her; as the mayor and mayor's wife, they were onstage to witness the whole horrible thing. In their shock, they leave Maryan to fall to her knees in the crowd.

After a few minutes, a group of Peacekeepers come to take Maryan inside to say goodbye to her sister. She goes with them, staring straight ahead, legs working jerkily, mechanically, like she is numb. She is gone now, just as surely as her sister is gone.

Merry wanders away. It is impossible for her to go inside that building and say goodbye to her friend; to do that would be to admit that such a thing could happen. Has happened.

The square always empties quickly after the Reaping ceremony; people retreat back to the safety of their homes, relieved that none of their children were chosen. That they are safe for another year, or perhaps forever. Merry's parents have disappeared also, are perhaps waiting for her at home, the small house adjoining the apothecary shop. They may have gone with the Donners. She doesn't know.

She walks slowly. Notices how the afternoon sun obliterates shadows, this time of year. Midsummer. When the sun reveals all, illuminates all.

Notices that she is sweating through the underarms of her lovely blue linen dress.

Ducks off the road to vomit in a clump of scrubby bushes.

...

She is grinding herbs in the silent shop when the singing begins.

There is an art to the mortar and pestle, a muscular twist of the forearm, a rolling grip of the fingers, that Merry has mastered after years. It's an art she can practice with her muscles while her mind is far away, and today her thoughts flee far from the empty house (her parents have gone, she knows not where, but she hasn't seen them since before the Reaping.). She grinds and gazes out the back window, not watching the front of the store as she ought to be, but today it hardly matters. No one will come.

She grinds and watches the sunlight disappear into the trees behind the shop. The back of their small lot abuts the edge of the district; there is a strip of brown, crisp grass and then, about fifteen yards back, the fence. And then the trees.

The light fades away to twilight, and she should long since have put down the mortar and pestle and gotten up, lit the stove, and started supper for her parents, who will surely return at any moment.

But no one appears, and instead of bustling about the place as she normally would, she is roused from her trance by the realization that she's humming along to a faintly audible melody. It's not familiar, but it must have repeated enough times that she's picked it up unconsciously: a lilting, gentle song. She can't hear the words, but it's only one voice singing, and it's coming from the grassy area in back of the shop.

The grinding eases, then stops, and her blue eyes narrow as she listens more closely. A single voice; a man. Singing behind their shop.

She is afraid, somehow, of scaring him, whoever he is. She sets the bowl down beside her softly and slowly, rises to her feet and purposely avoids the squeaky boards when crossing to the back door. The small shed blocks her view of the fence, but not of the trees beyond.

If he's there, he's seated on the white rock, a waist-level boulder jutting straight up out of the earth. The fence itself gives way to this boulder; it juts out into a V to go around the rock, which must have been there long before District 12 existed.

She creeps across the yard as silently as she can and slips around the side of the shed. Pokes her head around the corner...and there he is. Sitting on the rock, sure enough, hands resting on his knees, feet just touching the ground. Some kind of burlap bag on the grass next to him.

She knows him. Or at least, knows of him. Not his name, but she knows that he left school three years ago, that he trades with her father on occasion (the forbidden plants from the woods, the ones for which people will pay desperate amounts of money), that he lives across town. Near the Seam. She's never spoken to him, nor he to her; when he escaped his last Reaping she was a gangly child of fourteen.

She knew where he lived and what he traded, but she did not know he could sing.

His eyes are closed, and before he opens his mouth to begin his song again, he is merely average-looking. A strong, angular face, dark, longish hair all but obscuring one eye. Needing a shave. Tall and...not thin, exactly, the way Seam boys normally are, but bristling with a wiry strength.

But after he opens his mouth and begins to sing, he is beautiful.

His face is peace, all the angles smoothed. A rich tenor, much too full and expressive to possibly be coming from him. 

_'Are you going to Scarborough Fair?' _he sings, and suddenly she wants to go to this place, wherever it is, and she has no doubt it is as fair as he claims.

_'Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,' _he sings, and she can taste each herb, green and smoky and bursting on her tongue. 

_'Remember me to one who lives there,' _he sings, and she wonders who he means.

She begins to walk toward him across the brown, broken grass.

_'For she once was a true love of mine.' _And all at once his eyes are open, and he is silent again, and the spell is broken. He's looking straight at her. His mouth curls up to the side in a kind of half-smile, nervous but charming too. "He-hello," he says.

Her eyelids flutter as though she's just waking, and her hands begin to smooth the front of her dress. She doesn't answer him, instead taking an uncertain step backward. Suddenly very aware that she is alone.

He doesn't move from the rock. "So-sorry," he says, and his speech is hesitant, halting. Like he has to think hard about each word. "I didn't m-mean to dis-turb you. I di-didn't think anyone would be...here."

She nods. Why is he so nervous? Normally, with a boy (_a man_, she corrects herself) she would turn on Playful Merry, and comment on how lucky he is that she happened to be here after all. Or haughty, Town Merry, and ask just what he thinks he's doing here in the first place. But today, she has the energy for none of her usual beautiful-girl games.

So she just says what she wants to say. "No one_ is _here." It's true, in a way. She steps closer to him again. "What was that song?"

He stares at her for a few moments; she can see him considering what, and whether, he should tell her. _He can't lie easily_, she thinks, and wonders why she is reassured by this. "An...an old one," he finally says, with that curly half-smile.

Merry squints her eyes at him. "How old?"

"Oh..." He grins fully at her, and she catches a glimpse of beauty again as his angular face rounds out, and his eyes crinkle at the edges. "About a th-thousand years or so." He glances down at his soft leather boots, and then quickly up at her, clearly to see if she believes him. His eyelashes are long and sooty-black.

A laugh, and actual laugh, bubbles up in her throat, and her stomach flutters queerly. "No. Not really!"

He nods, and studies his shoes again. "It's true."

She smiles. "And how did you come to know it?" She takes a few more steps toward him, without realizing she's done it. She's close enough to see the small scratches on his hands and forearms, the callouses on his fingers. His muddy boots, the cuffs of his pants wet.

His face turns from shyly jovial to mock-serious, and she feels absurdly like laughing again as he answers, "That...is m-my secret." Then he grins again, and her stomach most decidedly flip-flops. "There's a wo-woman's part for it, too. I could teach you..."

"God, no!" She actually does laugh this time, in mock-horror. "I can't sing. At least...not like you."

Silence. And then, "What's your name?" she asks, because surely when he tells her, she'll recognize it. Surely a talent like his has not gone unnoticed, even in a place like 12.

"P-" he starts, then frowns, seeming frustrated. Silence for another few seconds. Then, "Paul Everdeen," he tells her, and the way he looks up at her suddenly, again, right into her eyes, making her insides burn, makes her think that he's been waiting to tell her this for a long time.

But that's absurd.

"And yo-yours?" he asks, frowning and closing his eyes against the slight hitch in his voice.

She frowns at him. "You must know it already; you trade with my father all the time."

"I wa-want to hear you say it."

An odd request. But she does say it. "Mer..." she starts, then lets her voice trail off. She cannot be Merry, for him. Not after today. She will never be Merry any more.

"Merideth Treadwell."

A slow smile spreads across his face, rounding its angles again, making him a thing of beauty. He closes his eyes like he's going to sing again, and she finds herself holding her breath. "Ju-just like a piece of mu-music," he says, then studies his boots with a frown. Again, she wonders why he is so nervous, what is stopping his voice.

"Mer-ry!" A shrill singsong voice from the shop behind her carries out into the yard, and Merideth starts and spins around. Her parents are home, no doubt wondering about the cold, dark shop.

"I'll be right there!" she calls, unnecessarily loudly.

When she turns back around, the rock is empty; Paul Everdeen has melted back into the woods somehow, there being nowhere else he could have gone.

Merideth is left hugging her own elbows in the sudden chill of full darkness, wondering whether she just imagined him after all.

...

But in the sleepy half-light of the following dawn...through her open window drifts the sound of every mockingjay in the woods singing Paul's _Scarborough Fair _song to greet the day. The thousand-year-old melody that makes the hollow pit in her chest fill with fire, just remembering his voice. The trees are full of melancholy and longing.

This is no dream.

...

"The baker's boy was here asking after you again, this afternoon."

"Hmm?" Merideth looks up from her half-eaten dinner. The squirrel-and-greens stew tastes bland, like paper, and she has been chewing the same bite for what seems like an hour. It would have tasted better if she'd made it, but her time had been otherwise occupied today. She'd barely made it home for dinner.

Her mother's expectant, wide-eyed look tells her that the previous statement needs some kind of response. "Oh," she manages.

"Young Timm sure has been coming around a lot lately," her father grumbles, but the small smile he gives her mother lets her know that the visits aren't entirely unwelcome.

Young Timm _has_ been oddly persistent lately. Young Timm has been a fixture around the apothecary's shop for Merideth's entire adolescence. When she was fifteen her parents gave permission for dating, and the very next day Timm had been at her door with a bunch of flowers and a big smile. He was chivalrous with her and courteous to her parents, almost as if it had been planned between the three of them, with Merideth given no say.

The pale little boy Merideth knew as Timmy Mellark, called Young Timm by the townspeople to differentiate him from his father, has somehow become her beau. She's not entirely averse to the idea, but, well…she has never given it much thought. He was just there, and she was here, and both their families had been thrilled. It had just kind of happened.

And it's not as though he's bad-looking: he's fair and blue-eyed, like her (they look enough alike to be brother and sister), and of a strong, stocky build, a square jaw, large but gentle hands. It's not as though he's bad-tempered: on the contrary, he has a jovial good temper, a self-depracating and never-cruel sense of humor, a gift for always saying the right thing. He could have any girl he wanted, and many want him; but, he seems to want Merideth.

It should be perfect.

After two years of going with him, and many warm and pleasurable kisses behind the brick ovens at his place and on the white rock at her place, and even a few sweaty, clandestine, rather painful and awkward evenings in the Meadow which she hopes no one knows about…she supposes she must love him.

She'd always thought love would feel different. Less…comfortable.

"Did he say he would come back tonight?" she asks, because she knows she's expected to ask.

"No, he said he needed to work late," her mother says, setting aside her napkin and rising from the table. "He hasn't seen you since…well, since Friday." The Reaping is never mentioned by name, not ever. Merideth has not heard Maysilee's name uttered by a single soul since she was taken four days ago. "He's been concerned."

Merideth cannot quell a twinge of annoyance.

Her mother continues, "We'll be out tonight, anyway. If he wants to come over after he's through…"

Merideth doesn't look up. "I'll see. Maybe I'll take a walk over there after I close up."

Silence, and she can feel her parents shooting questioning looks at one another. Then her father clears his throat. "Well, let's go," he says. Merideth doesn't ask where they are going, and they do not tell her. The less that you know, sometimes, the better.

...

She wasn't around to start dinner for her mother, this afternoon, because she'd taken the long way home. She'd had to take some willow bark tea and sleep syrup to the Vick house out by the Seam, after school; 4 of the 5 children had the chicken pox; the mother and the eldest daughter, Hazelle, were trying to care for all of them, and had finally broken down and sent for medicine. Her mother had warned her not to give them a thing if they didn't even have anything to trade, and that made her just angry enough to resolve not to return home in a hurry.

She smiled at Hazelle when she answered the door; the girl, a tall, dark beauty, is in the same class at school, but they don't have many friends in common. Hazelle gave a wan smile in return, but said nothing.

"You can give them the tea every four hours or so," she instructed Hazelle and her mother. "That should bring their fever down. You only need a drop or two of sleep syrup added to the tea, and that should…quiet them down for the night." She snuck a glance over at the big bed in the corner, which contained four crowded, sweaty, itchy, fidgety and generally miserable little bodies. The two youngest ones were wailing, scratching themselves bloody. "And baking soda mixed with water is good for the itching."

The mother frowned at her, and Merideth remembered: they probably didn't have baking soda.

"I…can try to get some at the Mellark's for you…"

"No," the mother cut in. "This will be fine. How much do I owe you for everything?" She reached for an old tin high up on a shelf.

Merideth panicked, taking in the tiny, cramped house, the sick kids in the bed, Hazelle at the stove, putting a kettle on to boil and looking everywhere but at her beautiful, blonde classmate. "Oh please…no. I can't…you keep it. Please. Nothing."

The mother acted like she hadn't heard. She held out two coins, and Merideth could clearly see that there were only two coins left in the tin. _Half of their money. There is no way._ But from the look on the mother's face, and the way Hazelle's spine stiffened as she stood across the room, Merideth knew she would have to take something. Seam people hated owing anyone, especially someone like her.

And then, inspiration struck. "My father always likes eggs," she offered, in the softest possible voice that will still carry.

Hazelle and her mother both looked up sharply. The oldest boy in the bed, about 11, glanced at Merideth too, and then quickly away. Officially, the Vicks did not keep chickens. Officially, no one in 12 did. Chickens were regulated animals, bred and raised in 10, their meat and eggs shipped in on trains and sold by the butcher to those who could afford them. Meaning, practically no one in 12.

Unofficially, the Vick children had been eating and sharing egg sandwiches at school for as long as anyone could remember, their neighborhood enjoyed chicken stew and chicken pie and chicken soup when the eggs became scarce, and the tiny shed in their backyard exhaled feathers when the door was opened. The animals could not see the light of day and Merideth was sure they were as sickly and starved as any creature in 12. But still…they were there.

Hazelle's mother gave her a curt nod, and Hazelle disappeared out the back, grabbing a square of cloth on her way out. The silence in the little house was deafening until she returned, the cloth full and knotted at the top.

"A dozen," she breathed, looking Merideth in the eye with a nod. They were square.

"So many…surely not," said Merideth.

"It's a fair trade," the mother said, a small smile forcing its way onto her lined face as she returned the two coins to the tin.

Over in the corner, the two little ones had started crying again as Merideth left.

She peeked in the cloth as soon as she rounded the corner away from the Vicks' house, and the eggs were brown and blue and green, each one large enough to nestle in the palm of her hand. She knotted the cloth again and walked on, trying not to calculate in her mind what a dozen chicken eggs might be worth, and exactly how many meals she was taking away from those sick children.

She'd never walked much in this part of 12, miles away from the safety and order of the Town. She didn't dare ask herself why she was doing so today. She didn't know, until she saw him, that she had been looking for him.

But there he was in front of her, coming out of a long, narrow lane lined with what could only be called shacks. Paul Everdeen, tall and lean, walking briskly down the lane with a sack slung over his back. There was a fluidity in his movements that made her think of a cat. He looked everyone in the eye and nodded as they passed him.

He was humming softly, to himself. He had not seen her.

Merideth ducked behind the nearest house, face flaming. She peeked out to watch his rapidly retreating form almost out of sight, then slunk out into the lane again. What in the world would she say if he saw her? She tripped along, hardly noticing where her feet fell, following him at a distance.

Embarrassed, suddenly. What was she doing? Keeping him in view, she slowed her steps and looked around, examining each doorway, trying to seem as though she was looking for a particular address. Perhaps the bundle in her hands would make people think she was making a delivery.

_I _was_ making a delivery_, she thought.

She followed him to the very edge of the Seam, where the houses became fewer and fewer, although the ragged work crews were adding more all the time. He walked more and more quickly the farther he got from the town, his movements freer and more fluid. She almost lost him when he slipped between two houses, the last standing on the edge of the Seam. Then he disappeared into the Meadow beyond.

Already breathless, she picked up her pace, darting recklessly between the same two houses, and managed to catch sight of him across the Meadow as he ducked to the ground, twisted his body through an impossibly small opening under the fence, and slipped off into the woods.

Merideth stood still in shock, hugging one arm around herself. She had never seen anyone leave the district before. No one who lived here, anyway. She glanced around, but no one else seemed to be walking this far out. _Why am I doing this? I should go home._ But her legs had their own ideas, and they carried her across the grassy meadow to the spot where he'd disappeared.

It was so quiet here. The trees beyond the fence rustled with the gentle movements of the air; the sun filtered through the leaves and dappled the earth. Green ferns, soft moss, dead and decaying leaves, slender young saplings covered the ground. She saw all this through the ugly metal links of the fence, but she could no longer see Paul Everdeen, did not know which direction he'd chosen.

But she saw, for the first time, the gap under the chain link fence. Had the fence still been electrified (as it had been all the time, when she was a small child), there would have been no way to squeeze underneath without receiving a deadly shock. She wondered if there was a similar gap underneath the fence behind the Apothecary.

She glanced behind her, but there was no one in the Meadow, no one around the few Seam houses.

A chickadee called somewhere close by, and was answered by another chickadee, farther inside the woods. And then by a mockingjay, who took the _dee-dee-dee_ call and made it a roving melody, a beautiful and wistful song. A few more mockingjays heard it, and couldn't resist joining in, until the whole expanse of woods beyond the fence was a cacophony of music. She wondered if Paul could hear it too.

She listened for a few minutes, a smile playing about her lips. Then she quickly undid the knot in the square of cloth, selected one blue egg and one green (the largest ones, at the bottom of the bundle) and set them carefully upon a large leaf, on the ground in front of the fence where he had disappeared.

She thought for a moment, then took a handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and wrapped the eggs, to keep them from thieves, animal and human alike.

Then, satisfied, she crept back home.

...

She wipes down the countertops in the Apothecary with a damp rag, but slowly, slowly. This is her last task of the evening, and after this is done she'll have no reason not to go to the baker's to see Timm. Who will want to fold her in his strong arms and comfort her, tell her they've got only one more year of Reaping to get through and then…and then…

Her throat constricts and she tastes bile, and in the next instant there is a soft rapping at the back door of the shop. She drops the polishing rag to the floor and turns, a slow ember burning from inside her chest as her legs betray her again. She moves forward, clasping her hands together, palms sweaty, and she rubs them dry on her apron before reaching forward to grasp the door latch.

But she can't open the door. Her hand is on the latch, and the ember inside her is flaring up because she knows who this is. And opening the door to him will mean…she isn't sure what. But there is a line, and she's about to cross it.

Merideth squeezes the latch and pulls the door open, and it's him. Paul Everdeen.

He is frowning, his mouth drawn into a tight line, and one hand is held up, the knuckles ready to rap on the door again. His mouth pops open into an "o" and she sees that he is cradling his other hand in the crook of his elbow. There are streamlets of blood on one leg of his pants, in splotches all over his shirt, all over the game bag which is now tied to his belt.

Their eyes meet, and the ember in her chest puffs into a flame, licking the insides of her ribs, stealing her air.

"Come in."

...

A/N The song Paul sings is, of course, _Scarborough Fair_, the ballad made famous by Simon and Garfunkel. It is an old English ballad whose lyrics date back many centuries, and resemble the lyrics of a Scottish ballad of 1670 titled The Elfin Knight, though it may in fact be much older. -Thank you, Wikipedia

Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;

Remember me to one who lives there, For once she was a true love of mine.

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt, Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;

Without any seam or needlework, Then she shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to wash it in yonder well, Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;

Where never spring water or rain ever fell, And she shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to dry it on yonder thorn, Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;

Which never bore blossom since Adam was born, Then she shall be a true lover of mine.

Now he has asked me questions three, Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;

I hope he'll answer as many for me Before he shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell him to buy me an acre of land, Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;

Betwixt the salt water and the sea sand, Then he shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell him to plough it with a ram's horn, Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;

And sow it all over with one pepper corn, And he shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell him to shear it with a sickle of leather, Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;

And bind it up with a peacock feather. And he shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell him to thrash it on yonder wall, Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,

And never let one corn of it fall, Then he shall be a true lover of mine.

When he has done and finished his work. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme:

**Oh, tell him to come and he'll have his shirt, And he shall be a true lover of mine**.


	8. Taking Aim

A/N What caused Peeta's sudden reversal at the beginning of Catching Fire? Methinks it was Haymitch. And how I do love writing him. :)

...

Step 8: Taking Aim

_**Just before full concentration is made on aiming, all the previous steps should be checked to make sure that everything is in the correct position.  
If any part of body feels out of place, then it is best to stop now, let the bowstring down and re-start again, rather than make a bad shot. -**__**Graeme Jeffrey Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008**__**  
**_

"Take a bath, Haymitch." She practically spits the words over her shoulder as she drops out the window, barely making a sound as she lands on the frozen ground below. The boy sneers at her back as she flits across the green toward her own house, but all the same, his eyes follow her until she is out of sight. Only then does he return to slicing the loaf of bread.

I sigh to myself, hauling my cheek off of the table. I don't want to have this conversation with the boy. I want to sink back into unconsciousness with the help of a bottle. But it's tour day, and the talk needs to be had.

We need to keep up appearances for long enough to figure out the next move.

"You know, you should give her a break." I try to make it sound casual, but it comes out louder than I intended.

The boy whips his head in my direction. "And why is that? I haven't been humiliated enough?"

"Let's take a walk." I push myself up from the table with a groan, fill a mug with the coffee the girl made, and haul the boy out into the falling snow. He has only a thin jacket on, and I have no jacket at all, but I'm not feeling the cold and, at the moment, I don't care what he's feeling.

Too many listening devices, back there.

I wait until we're clear of our three occupied houses, just to be sure. Then I turn on him. "You really are a selfish little bastard, you know that?"

He gives a mirthless laugh. "Selfish. That's one I haven't heard."

"I don't doubt it. You're Mister Wonderful of Panem at the moment." I take a long swig of coffee and practically choke; it's strong enough to bring tears to my eyes. The girl doesn't fool around.

"So it was selfish of me to love her so much that I was willing to die so she could come back home?"

I sigh deeply; this is going to take more talking than I anticipated. Generally the boy is so good at reading people, but with Sweetheart, he has a blind spot the size of a damn barn. "Look. It wasn't selfish for you to love her. And it wasn't selfish for you to try to protect her in the arena; in fact, that was one of the most stupidly selfless things I've ever seen." I take one more swallow of coffee and get a few grounds in my mouth for my trouble; I dump the rest into some bushes and throw the mug onto the front lawn of one of the empty Victor's houses. "But I'll tell you what was selfish: expecting her to love you back."

This stops him. Literally. It takes me a moment to realize he's not beside me any more; when I look back, he's frowning at me like part of him doesn't want to believe me, and the other part knows I'm right.

Good.

I continue. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but before the Reaping, you two had never even spoken to each other, correct?" He opens his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. "Oh I know, the bread, the bread, blah blah blah. Bottom line: you'd never spoken. You had umpteen years to talk to her, but somehow you never did." He's studying his shoes. "So in truth, you don't really know this girl at all."

His head snaps up and his eyes blaze into mine. "I know her. Better than you. We've been through-"

"The arena together, yeah. I get it. So you know she's pretty good with a bow and arrow and can slap together a tourniquet, and you'd want her on your side in a fight. Whole country knows that much by now. But tell me this: what's her favorite color?"

Silence. Then: "Um…"

"Yeah. Exactly. Tell me, has she ever had a boyfriend before?"

Now the kid's face is flaming, and he's staring past me, not meeting my eyes. "I don't…"

"No. You don't." I let that sink in. "It never occurred to you, did it, that all those years you were mooning and being miserable in your own life-"

"Hey!"

"She was busy having a life of her own. A pretty difficult life. Outside and apart from you." I move closer, speak more softly. "You were barely on her radar. And then you were thrown into her life against her will."

The kid looks like he might cry. Good. Now I have to be merciless, and it's better that he get his crying out of the way now.

"Did it ever occur to you that, in all those years of worshiping her from afar, you built her up in your mind so much that the reality, the _real girl_, can never live up to what you were expecting?"

The kid shakes his head, furious. "She didn't live up to it. She surpassed it. She's so...so much more than I..." He looks completely miserable, and the fact that he's still defending her to me speaks more of his devotion than his words can.

"But," and I'm a little more gentle now, because the coffee is kicking in, "She didn't have the luxury of a mental image of you that she'd been slowly fashioning over the years. She had nothing to go on, Peeta."

"So you're saying it was all an act? Everything? That she didn't..."

"Kid. This is the Hunger Games. The whole thing is an act."

The kid closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and blows my mind. "Except the dying. That part's real." He spins on his heel-the good one-and begins stalking back toward his huge, empty house.

I curse under my breath and jog to catch up with him; the action makes my stomach lurch, but I swallow it down for now. I have to fix this. "Well, yeah. But think about it. You'd never spoken before. She had no idea. For all she knew, you were making the whole love-thing up yourself."

"I wasn't…"

"You know that. And I know that. But how is she supposed to know that?" I chuckle at the thought of her confused frown, the night the boy confessed his love. "In case you haven't noticed, she's not the most perceptive when it comes to reading people." The boy smiles furtively at me and kicks at the gravel. "And you're pretty good in front of a camera, you know. You're one of the best I've ever seen at pulling an audience in. Even if you didn't really love her, it would have been easy to convince her, and the entire country, that you did."

"And that's what she thought I was doing." The kid shakes his head, looking past me, out at the woods. "So she was really just playing along…acting…"

I chuckle louder, and muffle a small belch. "Well, you and I may not be able to claim that we know Katniss. But there's one thing we know for sure about her…she's a terrible actress."

This draws a real laugh out of him. "Yeah, you're right about that."

"You said it yourself, in the Games. She can't lie. She can't fake liking someone if she really doesn't." I sneak a glance at him, and he's frowning out into the snow, hands stuffed in his pockets. "Watch the tapes: you can actually _see_ the moment when she stopped just pretending to like you and started actually liking you. It's all over her face."

He sighs. "So what do I do? She seems so...weirded out, now. Confused."

"You start over. Get to know her. The real girl, not the fantasy goddess. And then…see if you both still feel the same."

He's shaking his head again. "You think I won't love her any more after I get to know her? You're wrong."

I swallow down sour acid, just praying, now, that I make it back to my house. "No, genius. What I suspect is that you will love her more when you really know her._" _ And I might as well drop the bomb. Hell, it's as good a time as any. "And the way I see it, kid...you have to love each other. Because you're going to be stuck together for a very long time."

We walk in silence for a little bit, and I think it might actually be okay; I might have actually gotten through. He might realize that he has to fix things with Sweetheart, that there is no real choice here. They don't live happily ever after, we all die. If he knows this, and if he can convince the girl to go along (because I'm sure as hell not going to), it will be okay.

And then he talks.

"Have you ever loved anyone like this, Haymitch?" the kid mumbles, studying his toes, kicking ice-crusted pebbles into the gutter.

_Damn him_. My stomach gives a crazy lurch. "What do you think?" It ends in a half-belch, half-sob, but the kid doesn't notice. Or acts like he doesn't.

"I'll take that as a no."

And now I'm boiling with rage at the kid's assumption, my cold fists balled like rocks. It's irrational rage. The small part of me that is still sober knows this, but that part of me hasn't been in control for a long, long time. The larger part of me wants to clobber him before he speaks again.

"You don't know what this feels like," he goes on, not looking up at me. If he was, he'd stop talking right quick, because I feel my face contorting, my mouth curling up into a sneer. But like the lovesick buffoon he is, he goes on. "Loving her so much, living next to her, not even being able to-"

It happens without warning. My arms shoot up and grab the kid by the collar, and he's off the ground, both good leg and false one kicking in the air as I hold him up. No good. Don't want to kill him. But I don't seem to have control over my own body. It acts of its own volition; it never really stopped doing so after my time in the arena. My face aches and I wonder what expression lives there now. And if it can even come close to expressing the pain I feel when I think of her. Of them.

"Don't tell me what I don't know," I growl through my teeth, dropping him back onto the road but keeping a grip on his collar, keeping him firmly in place so he'll hear every word. "She's…still…alive." I lean in close. "That's the best you could hope for. That's what you worked for."

I let him go, push him away from me. "That's what you told me you wanted, when you accosted my drunk ass on the train last year. That was your 'strategy.'" I draw out the last word, mocking. "The fact that _you're_ still alive is a fluke. A mistake. It's thanks to her. It wasn't supposed to happen." I lean back and spit on the ground, off to the side, bile rising in my throat. I've gotta get out of here before whatever's in my stomach comes up.

The kid looks stunned, mouth half-open, eyes watery, maybe from the cold, maybe not. He's had enough. But like the fool that I am, I keep talking. "Don't tell me I don't know what it is to lose someone. You don't know. Because she's still here for you."

Fuck. I'm crying.

"And the next time you're feeling all noble and wounded, remember _she's_ the reason that you're here. She could have killed you a dozen times over, in those woods." I'm reeling, dizzy, hoarse with bile and tears, but I push the words out. "You better lay down and thank the gods that she felt as much as she did, with as little as she had to go on. And stop expecting more from her, like it's your due. Be grateful, why don't you, that either of you are here at all."

I spit out the last word and turn away, my hands shaking. I don't see the expression on the kid's face any more; I don't want to.

All I want to do is get home and screw the cap off of a bottle. Empty it by half. Before the prep teams descend, and this hellish tour begins. Before they come…Lily and Maysilee…to haunt me again.

...

There is a reason that I don't talk about them. Ever.

Lily was my girl. One of those tall willowy Seam girls, with dark hair like a curtain. That hair was parted on the side, and fell over one grey eye constantly, and she had a way of reaching up with one slim dark hand and tucking it behind her ear, then letting her hand trail down her neck. It drove me crazy, watching her do that. She'd look up from her desk and catch my eye, when we were both in school, and she'd let her hand linger on her neck a little longer, the fingers barely touching-

I can't think like this.

We were both 16, that summer. Too grown-up and sad for our age, as all Seam kids are. But still kids. I was more arrogant than most, and it didn't win me a lot of friends, but I won her. She was my girl.

And then they called my name, and the bottom fell out of my world. I don't remember the walk up to the platform in 12, but I remember the complete silence. Finally getting up there and scanning the crowd for her face, finding her among the other 16-year-old girls. Her eyes were right on me, and she wasn't crying like a few of the other girls were when they took their friends away. She just looked bewildered, like she wasn't sure what had just happened.

We'd spent the night before in the Meadow. Knowing we wouldn't have to get up for school that day. That was the last night we were ever together, really together. Two weeks after I got home, she and my mother and Aden were all dead. I don't talk about that.

I loved her.

They took four of us from 12, and Maysilee was one of the girl tributes that year. I didn't know the other two, but I knew her, a little. I'd seen her around. She was Town, so we hadn't had much to do with each other, but we knew one another in passing. We'd spoken once or twice, I guess. She'd had to leave her twin sister to board the tribute train, and having just said goodbye to my own brother (Aden...too young to really know what was happening, thank the gods), I felt a sort of kinship with her. She didn't cry, as her sister and friend had done when her name was called, as the other two tributes did. I didn't see her cry once that day.

But that first night at the training center, when I heard the knock on my door, I somehow knew it was her, and that she'd finally broken down. She appeared like a fragile, blonde ghost at my door, and then in my room. She was crying then. So was I. We helped each other wash off the ridiculous makeup, and then we clung together like fools on the bathroom floor.

_What are you doing_, I asked her when she kissed me. _ I have a girl back home. I can't_.

Here's what she said: _I have a boy. But he's not here now. And what does it matter, Haymitch. What does it matter? We're dead in just a few weeks. All of us_.

_Don't think like that_, I told her. _You could be the one_.

She looked so tired, so old and weary, then. Like that one night, that awful chariot ride, had aged her twenty years. _ I just don't want to be alone_, she said.

She got no more argument from me. Not that night, nor any of the rest that we spent in the training center.

She didn't give me away, when we teamed up later, in the arena. I didn't give her away, either. We weren't going to give them that kind of show.

I didn't love her. But I did, in a way.

And she _was_ alone, in the end. We all are, I guess.

...

There is a moment, when she first comes out of her front door (propelled, as though someone has pushed her; probably Effie), when you can tell she can't see anything yet because of the thickly falling snow. She wobbles, taking a moment to regain her balance, and squinting into the blinding white. I seize this moment to look at her; to_ really _look at her, as Haymitch suggested. To see the girl, the one I thought I already knew.

And I see…a girl. A young girl. Younger than me, I recall suddenly, by about 6 months. She had just turned sixteen, in the month or two before the Reaping. It's easy to forget that.

She looks cozy, rosy and bundled in soft sweater and boots and jacket, hair piled in elaborate braids, high on her head. Beautiful, as I know she is.

But her eyes, as she stands there. Her eyes are so lost, so almost desperate, as she tries to regain her footing, to see through the falling flakes, tries to find…me.

When her eyes do find me, they light up with more than just put-on enthusiasm. She is genuinely glad to see me, behind the obvious play-acting. _How have I missed this? _This is the girl who can't lie. She's here, she's alive, running toward me. The confusion and fear is still there, hidden from the cameras by her broad smile and the small giggles, both entirely unlike her.

She's afraid of me, I realize. Afraid that I'm so angry at her supposed indifference that I...what? Won't act my part? Won't love her any more?

_Oh Katniss...I'm so sorry._

She falls into my arms and I slip a little bit, then catch her and swing her around. _She's still too thin. _We fall into the icy snow, laughing desperately. We kiss, and it's not real. But it is real. She's real, alive, here. And I'm trying desperately to show her, with my body, with my presence, what I can't show in any other way. That I'm here too. That I won't betray her, won't desert her. I won't stop loving her, even if she can never return it, even if it's all too complicated and she has to run away, because that's what she does. I'll be here.

I decide, for good and all, in that moment, that I'll be here. Always.


	9. The Release

**A/N Oh. You guys are going to **_**hate me for this**_**. But...in my own f'ed-up head-canon...this is what happens. **

Step 9: The Release

_**The Release of the bowstring is the most critical step in the sequence.  
If it is not done correctly, then all the effort in the previous steps is cancelled out.  
To release the arrow correctly, the fingers holding the bowstring must allow the string to slip off the fingers.  
All three fingers must release at the same time. -**__**Graeme Jeffrey, Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008**__**  
**_

I share a silent breakfast with Prue, on what will turn out to be the last morning of my marriage.

My daughter and I sit across the worn kitchen table from one another, glancing up occasionally, sharing inane remarks. I am too numb and tired to do more. She's been chewing the same bite of cheese Danish for a few minutes now, looking more heartbroken and worn than any 22-year-old has a right to be, and I've been swirling my spoon around in my full bowl of oatmeal, studying the patterns that cut into the surface, and just as quickly vanish.

Prue finally swallows her bite of Danish and begins worrying away at her thumbnail, a childish habit for which I used to scold her, before she got too old for scolding. She's scowling down at her plate, her expression so adorably like Katniss' I can hardly catch my breath. Because Katniss will never have that particular expression on her face again.

"Daddy," she says, once she's worn the nail down to a nub.

"Yeah." I grip the spoon like it's going to help me, like if I can crush this utensil, I can stop this from happening.

"This is all happening too fast." Her blue eyes are boring into me, a mirror of my own, alive with panic. _This_ is something our little family can barely wrap our heads around. _ This _is hard. _This_ is ugly.

In the next second a loud thud reverberates above our heads, followed by a muffled string of curses. Prue and I both leap up and my spoon clatters to the floor, spattering oatmeal, and my daughter and I trip over one another all the way up the stairs. At the top of the stairs we stop, because the bedroom door is open and we can see Katniss there, fallen in a heap beside the bed, tangled in the sheet and struggling on the floor like a wounded animal in a snare.

Which is exactly what she is.

"Damnit damnit damnit!" my wife shrieks, and I don't recognize her voice. It's ragged and electric with frustration and fear. Her words are slurred because only the right side of her face will move now, the other side sagging grotesquely, like the skin is trying to slide off.

I approach her slowly and as silently as I can, although silence has never been my strong point. She looks up at me, her teeth gritted, her fingernails digging at the floorboards.

"Katniss?" Her left eyelid is drooping now. This is new, and it sends a stab through my heart, as sharp as any blade.

"I…can't…walk."

She's not crying. She's furious.

It is a particularly aggressive brain stem carcinoma, according to approximately every doctor in Panem. Which is who the District 12 doctors had assembled in that clean, bright conference room. Our problem was way, way beyond the capabilities of the small hospital here in our home district. A tumor. Okay. We went to 2. We went to 1. We went to the Capitol.

And then we came back home, and that roomful of specially-assembled doctors told my beautiful wife they couldn't help her. They can't operate and they can't give her medicine. It's gone too far, too fast, and it's going to kill her. Soon.

It's a rare form of cancer, unless you happen to have been exposed to a certain mixture of sarin and VX nerve gases-known carcinogens, both-at some point during your youth. Like, say, having been dropped into a dripping-hot arena, at age 17, and overtaken by the nerve gas as it stole through the jungle, while trying like mad to save your future husband's life.

You would have thought that the almost-immediate salt water purge would have leeched all the toxins out of your small, young, fragile, beautiful body.

The odds of one stray bit of chemical-just a few molecules, really-lodging itself inside your very DNA and lying in wait for twenty, thirty, forty years, choosing its moment and then blooming into a tumor that will devour you before you have a chance to meet your first grandchild…the odds are not high.

But the odds have never been in my family's favor.

...

My rage, when we get home from the meeting with the assembled doctors, the great minds of Panem...and after we have cried all that we can cry and she has fallen asleep, exhausted and weakened, in my arms…my rage is immense. It is beyond Flashback, it is beyond Mutt-Peeta anger. I can't be holding her while I'm feeling this, so I ease her head off of my chest and onto the pillow, and I drag myself out of the room and close the door, very gently.

And I go downstairs and I unsheath Katniss' hunting knife from the belt she hung carelessly on the doorknob just over a week ago, before we knew anything was wrong, when she was sure she'd be out hunting a thousand more times before she died.

And I make my way to the studio, which is on the other end of the house, in the room we had added onto the house the year Sage started school. We were facing all that free time, all that time with no children in the house, and what were we going to do with ourselves? Happy question. Happy answer: we built ourselves a studio. It has floor-to-ceiling windows over three walls. They are all retractable, so you can be in the open air in summer, or warm and cozy in winter. This was one of the luxuries we allowed ourselves. I paint here, and she comes here to write in the Memory Book.

There will be no more entries.

I limp over to the trapdoor that's hidden in the floor of the studio, and I haul it open and begin to pull out my old paintings, the ones that depict our Games. All of them. Ones I haven't looked at in years: the painting of the water dripping into the cave, the one of my own hands digging roots, the horrible image of the Glimmer-dog ready to attack.

Here, also, are the paintings culled from more recent nightmares, not real but just as horrible: my children when they were 16 and 12, holding hands, standing in the hot sun of the square while a name is fished out of the Reaping Ball. Katniss shooting an arrow through President Snow's heart, as she was meant to do, while Coin looks on from above. Katniss getting shot in the square of 2, by the wounded Peacekeeper; the spots of blood on the ground all around her, proof that her body armor has failed. These last paintings have never been seen by anyone but me.

All of my nightmares are here.

Of all the ways I've imagined losing Katniss over the years…mauled by a bear. Fell out of a tree. Died in childbirth. Assassinated by a disgruntled former resident of 13. This, what is happening now…this is the one thing I never imagined happening. Because all my nightmares do not add up to the horror coursing through my body at the thought of some mailgn chemical lodged in her brain, stealing her body and her mind and her personality and her thoughts and, finally, her very life.

The Games, rising up to crush us again.

I get a good grip on the knife and stab the first canvas, catching the Glimmer-dog in the throat and ripping right down to the bottom of the canvas, to the wood frame. I turn and stab the water dripping into the cave, the dry creek bed, Clove with her knives. Coin with her smile.

I destroy the Games that happened and the Games that never happened. Real, and not real.

My wife and children's images, I cannot bring myself to destroy. I lower them back through the trapdoor. I fasten the lock, blinking through my tears, the bolt sliding in the sweat from my hands, so they will be safe.

It's not enough.

I grip the knife again and kick the shredded canvases out of my way, and make my way over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. It is full dark; no moon tonight, so I see my reflection clearly in the glass: an old man, 56, my hair completely white, my face lined, my body softer than it was when the Games were real. I look into my own eyes and see myself a killer, starting with that little girl who lit the fire in the first arena, ending with Katniss. Because I couldn't save her from this.

At first I'm not sure how the glass has shattered, or why my hands and arms are bloody. Then I stab at the sharp steely edges again, the knife's blade coming down again and again, breaking all our beautiful windows. Sending shards onto the grass outside and into my flesh. Shatter, shatter.

Cato was right: I _am_ pretty handy with this knife.

...

This is how we figured out that something was wrong.

Only five weeks ago, we had a family dinner. This was not a usual occurrence, any more; often, one of us would be away, in the evening. I'd have to work late at the bakery; Katniss would be in the woods or, more often recently, visiting Haymitch, who can't get around very easily since his heart attack. Prue would be out with one of her gaggle of friends; Sage had been more and more preoccupied, lately, with his girlfriend.

The girlfriend was with him, that night. I was immediately suspicious, because she was not her usual shy-but-likeable self, and Sage was not his usual quiet-but-steady self. They were both jumpy and unable to let go of one another's hands.

I can see it, that last night before we knew: after dinner we all move in the sitting room in what feels like an overly-formal way: I settle into my chair, the one I've been settling into for so long it knows my body better than I do; Katniss takes to her rocker by the fire and leaves the love seat to Sage and Suzy, who squeeze so close together and hold hands so tightly, you'd think this was the last night of the world.

Prue settles on the floor at Katniss' feet, childlike, her knees drawn up to her chest and her head on her mother's knee. Just watching us, a cat-like grin playing about her mouth.

Katniss wears a similar, crooked grin, and will not meet my eyes, instead studying the feathers fixed to the end of an arrow, trying to find the perfect places to wind the thread. Clearly, an announcement is coming. One that I'm not going to like.

Sage has never been one to waste words. "We're getting married," he says. He grips Suzy's hand even more tightly, if that is possible.

Suzy is a tall, slender girl who had moved from District 11 to a small house on the edge of the Seam (not far from where Katniss used to live) the summer before, in time to share their last year of school with Sage and his classmates. My son had taken notice, been driven to distraction, frustration, and finally jubilation and worshipful devotion by this girl. Suzy.

She'd wanted to train as a nurse, and the secondary schools here in 12 are apparently better than in 11, as is the hospital; so, her family made the move that would not have been possible, before the war. When I first saw her, she reminded me so much of little Rue from the first arena that I had to wonder if they were related, somehow; Suzy's hair was curlier and tied up in dozens of careful, tiny braids, but she had the same large brown eyes and smooth, coffee-colored skin, the same soft voice and gentle manner. After Katniss first met her, the nightmares were especially bad for a week or two.

"Married," I say. My mind is blank. "Wait. Married?" Sage nods, looking straight at me and not wavering one inch. Suzy bites her lip and stares into her lap. "You're eighteen," is all I can think of to say.

"How old were you when you and Mama got married?" Prue asks, her voice deceptively light. I stare over at her, my lips pressed together. Her cat-grin has bloomed into a full smile, her eyes a bit too innocently wide; Katniss, beside her, still wears her lopsided grin and refuses to meet my eyes.

_Nineteen_, is the correct answer. And she knows that. "That's..."

"Different?" Prue offers. She's got that teasing look in her eye, and she's smiling in that knowing way that makes her just as beautiful and frustrating as her mother. I have to look away.

"We were..." I try again.

"In love?" This time it's quiet, gentle Suzy who finishes my thought for me. She's studying me through her eyelashes in a curious way. "So are we."

I lean forward, elbows on my knees. In full-on Dad Mode. "I get it. Believe me, I do. But...Sage, what about school?"

He just smiles back at me and shrugs his shoulders, completely prepared for this. "I'm going next year."

I run my hands through my hair. "Son. You want to be a doctor. Right? It's all you've been talking about since you were twelve. You were going to accept one of those hard-earned spots at the Academy, in the Capitol, so you can become a doctor." I stare at him; he's so calm. "Are you still planning to do that?"

Still, that unnerving smile. "Of course I am. And so is Suzy," he adds, with a proud look at her. "Next year."

"No. You're going this year."

"Dad-"

"If you put this off...it'll never happen. Something will come up next year, and the year after that, and you'll find some reason not to go." I try not to look at Suzy as I reason with him. Knowing it can't be entirely her fault. Unable not to blame her, just a little, for my son throwing away a career I know he wants.

"Dad. We've already applied for our deferments. We're putting off training for one year. We'll work here, gain one more year of experience volunteering at the hospital here in 12. Then we'll both go to the Capitol." He smiles at Suzy, who offers him a thin, watery smile in return. "This year we have a Toasting to plan."

I hide my face in my hands. A last-ditch effort is what I need. So I use one: "Deferments aren't always honored; then you'd have to start the application process all over. That's another year, right there. Look, if it's a question of...maybe you don't get married right away. Maybe you both go to the Capitol and complete your training, and _then_..."

"Dad." Prue is about to save the day. As she does. She has scooted over to me on hands and knees and is now sitting at my feet. She places her clasped hands on my knee, and rests her chin on her thumbs. Pauses to take a careful breath...and then drops the bomb, as only a true Mellark could do:

"You're going to be a grandfather."

...

I had to rely on my daughter to say all of the things you are supposed to say, at a time like that. I was too stunned. But she didn't disappoint. She rushed over and clasped little Suzy in a warm embrace, nearly knocking her off the love seat. "I'm so, so happy you're going to be part of our family," she gushed, smiling. "You have to let me help you plan everything. This is so exciting! I always wished to have a sister, you know."

"What am I? Chopped liver?" Sage was frowning in a mock-angry way he'd perfected after years of sparring with his fiery, yet warm and affectionate sister.

"Oh, you'll do." She waved a hand at him dismissively, then turned back to Suzy. "So tell me absolutely everything." It was amazing, really, how much she'd inherited from me inwardly (I tried to remember even one instance of Katniss gushing at anyone, ever, and couldn't), when she resembled her mother so closely on the outside. Right down to the freckles across the bridge of her nose.

I glanced over at Katniss; she had been attempting to catch my eye from her rocker ever since the "wished to have a sister..." comment. She still wore her crooked (ironic, I thought at the time) smile, and her eyes were shining with mischief, but there was an undertone of sadness. She eased up from her rocker (the bruised tailbone from years ago had been paining her for weeks) and walked up behind my chair, snaking her arms around my shoulders.

Sometimes it was easier to have these sorts of conversations when we weren't looking at one another.

"Am I the last one to know about this, then?" I sounded mostly amused, but, to my surprise, there was a touch of bitterness there. At everyone having pulled one over on old Dad. The noise from the love seat was not helping: Prue squealing and placing the palm of her hand on Suzy's still-flat abdomen; Suzy looking hotly mortified, but pleased; Sage teasing them both in that gentle way of his.

Katniss planted a lingering kiss just underneath my jawline, which melted the bitterness nicely, leaving only warmth. I turned and she was right there, smiling at me; smiling, still, with only one side of her mouth, the right side. The other side only twitched, as though she was about to laugh.

But I didn't think much about that, because at the time, her eyes were crinkling with pure happiness and her hair (the exact grey of her eyes, now, shot through with only a few streaks of her original black) was brushing against my neck. "Technically," she said, pulling my hands into hers, "You're only the...fifth person to know." A pause. "Sixth, if you count the doctor."

She laughed, and I laughed with her, and Sage, who had been watching us anxiously from the love seat, finally relaxed and accepted a hug from his mother and a handshake from me. And all five of us settled down to the task of planning out our new reality, just when we'd thought the future was settled.

It turned out to be good practice.

...

It was only later that night, when Katniss and I were about to go to bed, that the memory of her oddly-lopsided smile came back to jar me.

"Peeta?" she called from our bathroom, and her voice was wavering just enough that I strapped my false leg on again and limped my way to the bathroom.

To find her smiling at herself in the mirror. Smiling with only the right side of her mouth. And it wasn't cute, or ironic, or even oddly comical. Because she was touching the left side of her mouth, her cheek, her chin, with her fingertips, in a way that let me know she couldn't feel them at all. They were dead. I caught her eyes in the mirror and we stared at one another's reflections for a long, long time before either of us spoke.

I had only seen terror like that in her eyes once before. She had just come up out of the tube into the first arena, and the sunlight was blinding her and for a moment, she didn't know where she was. Or what she was going to do, to survive.

_Hold on_, I had silently willed her then, when I couldn't speak to her for very different reasons. _Hold on_, I tried to tell her now, but the words caught in my throat. _Hold on_.

...

_When it happens, it will happen quickly_. That's what the most senior doctor, the one from the Capitol, told me. He was old enough to have witnessed many Hunger Games, to have been forced to treat several victors after their competitions ended. To have seen the effects of this poison firsthand. _She'll be fine, and then suddenly she won't be. There will be...memories. Her mind will retreat, she will relive events from the past. _He shook his head and met my eye only briefly. _Once that starts, you may not get her back again_.

"Katniss?" I kneel next to her. She was lucid, she knew us, a few seconds ago. Now that's over.

"Peeta, could you get me some water?" Her voice is clipped and nervous, young, fundamentally suspicious. Untrusting because she doesn't know me. This is Katniss from the first arena; I know it even before she speaks again. "I think I left my water skin down by the creek. We have to get it." She's there, completely there. She's back in the arena. She clutches at my sleeve, her grip firm but desperate; god, I remember it so well. Even after 40 years. "I can't walk. I don't know why, but, you have to get it. Please. Cato will find it, he'll figure out where we are, I didn't hide us well enough. I've got to..." She curls up and clutches her head in her hands, silenced by pain.

I am ruined by this.

Broken, by the knowledge that this, her last day (as I know now that it is), will be spent reliving her time in the first arena. When she was-she thought-really alone. Scared. She'll die at last in the arena, the one she never really escaped.

They have her. They still have her, after all this time.

I fall to my knees. "Katniss."

She uncurls her body from the fetal pose, and clutches the front of my shirt with her good right hand, strong with youth again. "You have to let me go," she hisses through clenched teeth. "You need the medicine. I have to go, you can't die..." She draws me close, desperate. "I can't go home alone." Then she clutches her head again. "RUE!" she screams. "Rue!"

"Come back," I whisper. "Come back to me. Please."

Instead, her body arches and she collapses onto the floor, her good leg pinwheeling in a crazy dance, her arm beating me away. I fall back; I don't know who she thinks I am, but she'll kill me if she gets her hands on me.

She is fighting this with her entire body.

I am broken.

Without a word, my daughter steps forward and gathers my wife in her arms, lifting her with no effort and murmuring soft, comforting words into her messy, loose hair, as her mother did for her when Prue was a tiny child. (Prue is taller than Katniss, now, and more sturdily healthy than her mother ever was.) Katniss relaxes immediately as Prue strokes sweaty tendrils of grey hair off her forehead; I don't know where she is now.

Prue catches my eye and murmurs, "Go get Sage?" I see that her face is wet and streaked with tears. "I'm taking her to the woods, Daddy."

There is nothing I can do but nod at them, and go.

...

I don't remember how I got to Sage and Suzy's (a small house by the Meadow, not far from where her parents live). After we'd gotten the news about Katniss, the two of them had wasted no time; they had a small private Toasting and quietly moved in together.

I knock and Sage answers, his hair still mussed from sleep, and he looks at my face once and knows this is the last day. He crumples, there in the doorway, clutching the door frame for support. Suzy appears behind him, pulling a robe on.

"Is this it?" she asks, her voice crackly with just-waking, and I take in her dark-circled eyes, her hunched shoulders, her newly-visible baby bump.

_What a terrible beginning_, I think. I only nod, too numb to speak, and she nods back, walking up and placing a hand on her husband's shoulder. "We're with you," she says.

...

We find mother and daughter at the rock in the woods, the flat one where she and Gale used to meet for hunting. Prue has set her down on the rock itself and is watching her with a scowl from the edge of the clearing. Sage, Suzy and I stop just out of the trees too, and watch her. Katniss is looking all around, frowning lopsidedly, the pulled-down side of her face twitching. She gazes up at the dappled sunlight filtering through the yellow and orange leaves. Closes her eyes to feel the gentle breeze on her skin. Studies the ground around us, pressed to bare dirt by generations of feet. Strokes the rock with her good hand.

She hears my footsteps and zeroes in on me. "Oh," she says. "Is Gale coming?"

I take a step toward her, clearing my throat. "Y-yes." I force myself to smile. "He's meeting us here."

"Good," she says. She is brisk, businesslike in this moment. "Tell him I saw turkeys." She settles herself more comfortably on the rock, her feet dangling, not quite reaching the ground. "Fat ones," she adds.

Prue's eyes meet mine in a panic, for the second time in a day, and I know she's about to flee, because this is too much. I hold out my hand and shake my head at her. _No._ My mouth forms the word, but no sound comes out. We need her now.

But she shakes her head back at me. _No._ My daughter backs up a few paces, head high, chin trembling, hands balled into fists. She whirls around and disappears into the trees, fleeing silently, so we can't even tell her direction.

Katniss is lost, again, just like that. One moment she's quiet, and I think that it might be okay. The next moment she's curled up on her side on the rock, knees drawn up to her chest, trembling and sobbing as the evil poison eats at her.

We go to her, but she doesn't even see us. "They're dying…she's dying." She shakes her head side to side, pulls at her hair with her good hand. "It's my fault! Peeta! I can't find you. I didn't make it. I fell. It _hurts…_" Sage, sobbing silently, tries to hold her hands so she won't hurt herself, but it's no good. She's in the Games again, trapped in the arena, and this is how she will go. Gasping for breath. Scared, lost, alone. "They're dying," she says.

My heart is aching so hard I can't breathe. I'm paralyzed.

I don't know how much time goes by.

Then we hear a rustling in the bushes and look up, through our tears, surprised, even Katniss. It's Prue. She's back. She stumbles through to us, her eyes as red as ours, her face as wet. She is wet to the knees, also, and in one of her hands is a bunch of dripping katniss roots. She must have run all the way to the lake to dig them up. In the other hand is Katniss' bow, and a few stray arrows.

Katniss props herself up, still hunched over and uncertain, but curious. Prue comes on silent feet, sets the plants and the carefully-crafted bow on the rock next to her mother, and kneels before her. She takes Katniss' hands in her hands, and looks straight into her eyes.

"They're dying," Katniss whispers.

"No, Mama," she says. "They don't die." She lays her cheek against one of Katniss' palms. One tear escapes her eye and rolls down to the tip of her nose, but her voice is steady. "They don't die any more, Mama. Because of _you_. Because of what _you_ did, they're safe. For always."

I can see Katniss coming back. She's still trembling and breathing in gasps, but I can see the functioning corner of her mouth trying to turn up in a smile, her good eye squinting almost shut as she tries to control the muscles, makes one last effort to show her daughter she's okay.

I slide over to her and throw my arms around her from behind, holding her up as her body betrays her. I bury my face in her hair. It smells like earth. She leans back into me with a sigh. I can feel Sage at my side, resting his head on Katniss' shoulder. Putting his arms around both of us. Suzy at his side, sobbing silently.

Prue must be crying now, because even her voice is shaking. "I am so proud of you, Mama. I am so proud…to be _yours_."

I feel Katniss trying to move her arm, her good arm, and I ease up on my embrace just a little, just enough for her to inch her hand forward. Prue is resting her head on her mother's lap, now, and Katniss just manages to run her fingers through her daughter's hair once, twice, before the shaking becomes too much. She takes a deep breath, and when she speaks, her voice is as clear and strong as it was the day she volunteered.

"Shoot straight, Little Bird," are the last words we hear her say.

...

They want to take her to the Capitol. Erect a statue. Give us a plaque.

I tell them, no. Very quietly, very finally, No. I imagine her horror at such a thing, and I'll tell them no a thousand times until they go away.

They go away.

My son stands in the doorway, blocking it with his body until most of them have gone away.

For those that are left, the persistent ones, those with cameras and notepads, he opens his mouth and shouts. Bellows. Screams horrible things, unbelievable insults. Tells them where they can shove their cameras.

Who knew my quiet, thoughtful son could make such a noise that all the neighbors are drawn out to watch from their porches as the reporters run...not walk, _run_...down the lane and away from our house.

After everyone is finally gone, I have those we trust take Katniss down to the woods. To the rock. It's a familiar place and she'll like it.

We don't see Prue for several days, after.

...

There is a memorial service, but I'm not there.

I'm in my chair. Watching the woods.

My daughter reappears. Gets herself together. She's wearing a long skirt and her hair is down loose, and for a moment...

"Sage says you haven't moved in three days."

I look up at her. Genuinely surprised. _Gosh. Has it been three days? _My voice is strangely flat; I can't feel the sounds coming out. Like I'm opening my mouth and emitting a recording; the voice of someone who still knows how to speak.

"Dad. Please come today."

_They want me to say something._

"Yeah." It's a whisper.

If I look closely enough, I can see each and every leaf. Every blade of grass. I sink into my chair. If I look away from the woods now, I might miss...

Prue's gone away. I don't know how long she stood there next to me, waiting for an answer.

...

I wait until my children have been gone for a while, and then I push myself up from the chair. I push open the back door. I let my bare foot and my false foot drag across the cool grass, feeling the soft blades with one set of toes, feeling nothing with the other. I walk into the woods.

I find the rock.

She's there.

The earth around the grave is darker, freshly turned. She's just beneath her rock, the one that overlooks the valley.

I kneel down next to the fresh-turned earth. It smells like our garden, the garden we worked on together. I lower my hands into the dirt. I let sprinkles of it coat my fingers.

I plunge my hands into the dirt; it's soft and pliant and I think I can still feel her. I think she's there. I think my hands still remember how to find her.

"Daddy."

My daughter inherited the gift of silence. She came up behind me without me knowing; I turn my head and she's there, right there. I swivel around and scan the clearing, but we're alone. Everyone else is at the service.

I turn back to the earth, only to find that I've dug myself about a foot down into the grave. It's a small hole, but I'm filthy, my fingernails caked with black dirt.

Prue takes my hands in hers, forces me to look at her. She's been crying. She pulls me up, like I'm a little boy again; we sit on the rock together and she puts her arm around me, holding me up as she did for Katniss, like she's the mother and we're the children.

"Do you know where I was, those first few days?"

I don't answer, just stare down at my hands. They're coated with dirt.

"I was here. In the woods. With her."

I look at her, then, surprised that we've been thinking approximately the same thing.

"She's not down at the town hall, with all those people, being memorialized," she continues. "She would have hated that."

"Yeah," I agree. It sounds almost like my voice again, a flatter version.

"She's not there. She's not in the Capitol. And she's not trapped in the arena, Dad. She's here." Prue slips down from the rock. She sits on the ground, runs her hand over an exposed root. Brushes a low fern. Picks a dandelion gone to seed and blows on it, scattering the white fluff to the wind.

I watch, as the seeds drift out beyond my reach.


	10. Follow Through

**A/N We've reached the end :) Hopefully I'm ending on an up-note (and re-asserting my M rating). This has been fun. In the coming months, watch for an expanded, multi-chapter version of the Merideth/Paul story**. ** For now, enjoy...and I had to throw in a "Get it together, Mellark." I just had to. But it's not coming from the usual person. Hah!**

Step 10: **Follow Through**

_**...It is important to not let the bow arm fall after the release, as this can become a problem when the bow arm actually starts to fall on the release, making some arrows land low on the target. Also moving the head to see where the arrow went too soon after the release can make the bow arm move sideways. -**__**Graeme Jeffrey, Copyright Centenary Archers Club Inc. 1999-2008**__**  
**_

He comes back to 12 in late summer, when the woods are a lush green and the Meadow a riot of wildflowers. As he crosses the square with the colorful paving stones, the hot afternoon sun is reflected back from the sparkling water of the fountain in its center, and he squints, shading his eyes. The fountain is new; the paving stones, he remembers. He remembers the children, too, laughing and chasing one another in the sunshine, wading barefoot in the water, stronger and better-fed than the children of just one generation past.

Though, these must be new children, he reasons. Those he saw during his last visit will have long since grown.

He also remembers the bakery. It occupies a central location just off the square, a large brick building with two plate-glass windows along the front. He sees the multi-layer cakes, pies, doughnuts, cupcakes displayed in one window, just as they were 13 summers ago; the other window shows the dining area occupying the front room of the bakery.

The front door of the place is constantly opening and closing, opening and closing, and it's clear that the people spilling in and out of this warmly-lit space aren't only there for the baked goods. There are old folks gathered around tables, young couples on couches, kids off in corners reading. He sees families with gaggles of children, alongside workers from the pharmaceutical plant with their ID badges still swinging on lanyards around their necks.

Dannick strides across the square, smiling a little; he remembers the man who ran the bakery, an old friend of his mother's who had been very kind to him on his last visit, and he promised himself this would be his first stop today. His long legs carry him up to the front window and he peers in, squinting, but doesn't see the blonde man whose name is above the door; instead, a dark-haired young woman darts about behind the counter, ringing up customers and talking nonstop, seemingly everywhere at once. She has a word for everyone who passes, an eye for everything that's going on in the dining room. The vibrant social atmosphere of the place is mostly her doing.

His vision shifts and suddenly, his own reflection comes back to him from the polished glass. He smirks at himself: a tall, lean man, dark hair gone gray at the temples, lines around the eyes, older than the flattering picture of himself his own mind still conjures.

He is easily humbled by the sight of himself, as he really is...especially when contrasted to what he had been the last time he visited 12: a cocky young man about to be married, someone who'd had his choice of everything in life but had yet to suffer any real trials, someone who did not appreciate what he had, how young he still was and all that still lay before him.

_No use, thinking like that._

The smell hits him as he opens the bakery door and the bell jingles: the warm, yeasty scent of bread, the sugar and cinnamon of cookies, the sweet fruitiness of pies. The lighting is warm and golden-yellow. He hears the low hum of conversation, the jingle and slam of the cash register, and above all else, the high, sweet laughter of the woman working behind the counter.

It sounds like music.

His looks at her more closely, now: she's working with her back to him, up on a stepstool and trying to get her hands on a canister of flour on a high shelf. She's still laughing and calling to the woman for whom Dannick is now holding the door, a tiny blonde with an even tinier blonde in tow, also laughing.

"Yeah, let me know how that works out for you, Celia," calls the young woman up on the stool. She's talking over her shoulder, her eyes still trained on the canister she can just barely reach, wavy dark hair gathered into a long ponytail that hangs to the small of her back. Even her speaking voice is musical, lilting and expressive. "I'd love to get in on that secret."

"I'll bet you would," Celia fires back, chuckling, throwing an appreciative glance Dannick's way as she exits with her daughter, both of them munching sugar cookies.

It's a glance he would normally return...but today, he finds his eyes drifting back to the dark-haired woman. The woman whose taut curves are on full display as she goes up on her toes, finally, to grab what she's after. The grubby white apron she's wearing can't fully hide the swell of her breasts, the ties around her waist accentuating the way the seat of her jeans hugs her behind.

_Dirty old man_, he thinks, shaking his head in disgust at himself.

"Can I help you?" She's calling over her shoulder, and he realizes she's talking to him only when no one else answers her. He's now the only one standing around the display area in front of the cash register; the hum from the dining room is constant and echoes around, giving the illusion that one is surrounded by people.

She's settling the canister against her hip, swiping a few long dark strands of hair out of her eyes.

"Uh, yeah...I'm actually looking for Mr. Mellark?"

She smiles at this; he can see the swell of her cheek as she steadies herself against the shelving and steps down onto the floor. "Would that be my dad, or my brother?"

And then, in an instant, Dannick knows who she is. His mouth falls open, then spreads into a disbelieving grin. "Prue?"

Another teasing smirk, and the woman turns around fully, still resting the huge canister against her side. She must be 25 or so, now; older than he thought...but not by much. "Depends on who's asking," she says, dimples popping out on her cheeks and mischief in her eyes.

The words die out as she catches sight of him. Her lovely face, so much like her mother's, goes slack with shock. Her long-lashed eyes, a dark sparkling blue he remembers well, take in his face, then flick quickly downward over the rest of him. They settle on his face again and she gives her head a little shake.

"Oh my god...Dannick Odair," she says in a half-whisper, and drops the canister.

The top is loose, and the floor all around her feet is instantly blanketed with finely-sifted flour. "Shit," she breathes, frowning down at the floor and then back up at him before stalking a few paces away to grab a broom and dustpan.

He's behind the counter with her in a few seconds. "Let me help."

"No, it's okay," she says, sweeping at the white powder and refusing to meet his eyes. He grabs the dustpan from her anyway, steadying it for her while she sweeps. "Clumsy," she says with a breathy laugh, then shakes her head at herself.

He smiles at her. "I'm surprised you remember me at all." She looks up at him with one eyebrow raised, then quickly down again, swiping at the fine powder that's worked its way into the cracks between the tiles. "Last time I was here, I barely got a good look at you. You were always hiding behind doorways, under tables, up in trees..."

She laughs that breathy laugh again. "Well...yeah. I was a little shy. Around you." She rises with a full pan, and taps the flour into a waste can, raising a white cloud. She sets the broom aside, waving the cloud away from her face and coughing a bit. She meets his eyes and the next words tumble out of her in a rush: "I had a big crush on you, back then."

Her eyes widen immediately and her face flushes the loveliest shade of dusky rose he's ever seen. She wipes her palms on her apron and catches her top lip between her teeth. "Wow...I can't believe I just said that out loud." She smiles, and the amazingly open and inviting expression spreads over her whole face. It's hesitant and vulnerable and radiant, and it makes him feel he can see every thought passing through her mind.

He merely smiles back at her; he couldn't look away if he tried. Little Prue Mellark. _Wow. If I was 10 years younger... _He mentally slaps himself for such a thought. Her relative youth screams at him, her vibrance and energy are palpable. He is faded in comparison, used up, off the map for someone like her.

She sets the dustpan down and claps her hands briskly, making him jump. "So you're looking for my dad?"

"Yeah. He's definitely the first, on my list of must-visits."

She nods. "Well, he doesn't really work at the bakery much, any more. But you can find him up at the house. Do you remember..." She frowns and again cocks one eyebrow at him. "You know what? I'll show you myself. I need to head back soon anyway." She looks over his shoulder, toward a swinging door he assumes goes back to the kitchen area. "Hey Posy!" she shouts. He jumps again, as her voice thunders past him.

An older woman, salt and pepper hair pulled back into a bun and flour smudged across one cheek, pokes her head around the door. "Yeah?"

"I'm headed out. Are you okay to close up?"

Posy nods, glancing at Dannick with raised eyebrows but saying only, "Cartwright boy should be here any minute. He can help."

Prue rolls her eyes. "He can try. See ya tomorrow."

She unties her apron and grabs a leather satchel from behind the counter, waving to several people in the dining area and walking over to chat with an elderly couple on a couch before allowing Dannick to hold the door for her.

As a mark of respect to her dad, he makes a point of _not_ staring at her ass as she walks by.

...

Her dad asks Dannick to stay for dinner, _of course_, since he is incapable of not being a gracious host, even now. He even makes the effort to cook, talking to his old friend's son all the while; like this is something that happens every day in his house, chatting with a guest while bustling around the kitchen.

Like his daughter hadn't had to remind him to please, please take a shower today, as she left before dawn this morning.

She would chide him for still keeping baker's hours, if it wasn't so sad that he didn't need to keep baker's hours any more.

"So what brings you back to 12?" Peeta asks, and Prue watches their guest for his answer, hiding her curious eyes behind the rim of her wine glass.

"Ah, well, I'm a teacher," he answers. "There's an opening for a senior-level instructor at the secondary school here, and...I needed a change of scenery, I guess." His voice is like butter: smooth and rich. His eyes are the most amazing shade of green, his skin tan and smooth, like some kind of ocean-city god. Just as she remembers. His dark hair has just enough gray, now, to make him interesting.

And she has been trying so hard to look like she's not staring that she's missed whatever it was he just asked her.

"Huh?" is all she has to say, in reply to his expectant silence.

She doesn't miss her dad's eye-roll at this, and throws him a dirty look. Dannick only smiles and repeats, "I was just saying that the schools here have developed quite a reputation for excellence. I teach history, and I've been told the standards are quite rigorous. Was that your experience?"

She lets her gaze drop to her plate, shrugging. "I suppose so. I feel...educated?" _Really? _"You'd have to ask my brother; he was always more school-oriented than I was." _Oh, excellent answer_. _What the hell is wrong with me? Get it together, Mellark. Focus._

But Dannick is smiling, charming, smoothing over any awkwardness. "Oh, yes, I remember your brother. Cute little chap. Where is he now?"

Peeta actually smiles at this; of course, mentioning the Golden Child can always coax a smile. "If you have any questions for him, you'll have to ask quickly; he and his family will be leaving within the month for the Capitol."

"He has a family, does he? Wow, that makes me feel old." Dannick shakes his head with a wry smile, and it makes Prue smile too. 'Old' would not be the word she would choose.

"Yes. Their son Paul is two and a half, and Rosemary is their newborn. Sage has been taking correspondance courses for the past two years, and he's starting medical school in the fall." Peeta is clearly getting ready to talk Grandkids, the one subject on which he can still effortlessly discourse.

"Paul...wasn't that..." Dannick is frowning.

"He's named for my mother's father," Prue says quickly, with a nervous glance at her dad. It's the first time her mother's come up all night, and Prue has been dreading it. Not because of the hot pool of lead that still fills her belly at the mention of her mother, even three years later...but because of how her father may react.

But all she can see, so far, is a tightening of Peeta's fingers around his fork and a flexing of his jaw; things you wouldn't even notice, if you didn't know him.

"Oh," Dannick frowns, and before she can stop him, he goes on. "My mother and I were so, so heartbroken to hear about...Katniss. I know that my mom considered her a..."

But Peeta is gone. He has risen very quietly and walked out of the room, the way he always does when his late wife's name is mentioned. Prue lays down her fork and stares after him, knowing he won't show his face for at least a day, now.

"Oh," Dannick says again. "I'm sorry...did I-"

"It's okay. It's not your fault. I should have warned you not to mention my mother." Dannick looks so distressed, and he's making movements like he's going to get up and go after Peeta, which is the worst thing he could possibly do. Her hand shoots out and falls on top of his, and their eyes meet again. She is struck by the warmth he exudes, the steady calm. "He just, um, took it really hard. When she...died."

Dannick nods. "Yes. He would, wouldn't he." He flips his hand over and gives hers a squeeze; his palm is calloused, his rough fingertips brushing her wrist, and her heart leaps. _Oh, god. Say something_. She opens her mouth.

But suddenly she is twelve years old again, all elbows and knees and matted hair, 5 feet tall and meeting handsome Dannick Odair with her dad at the train station. Shaking the young man's hand and looking into his sea-green eyes and feeling a warm pulse of...something...course through her body for the first time. Not being able to take her eyes off of him on the walk back through town. Terrified of being in the same room with him, for fear she would blurt and say something embarrassing.

This is not usually a problem. Navigating romantic waters has always been laughably easy for her. She does not get nervous or flustered; she is usually in control. _He's out of your league_, she chides herself. _He still sees you as some little kid who climbs trees and hides under tables. He said it himself._

_He hasn't given you a thought_.

...

The whole district is crowded in and around the bakery tonight, the last night in 12 for Sage Mellark and his small family. The gorgeous but exhausted Suzy shepherds their little boy Paul, who has Suzy's tight curls and coffee-colored skin, and grey Seam eyes leveled far too seriously at the world. And Rosemary, the tiny queen of the evening, sleeping through the din in her grandfather's arms for most of the night, her silky curls glossy and dark against Peeta's fair skin.

Prue finds Dannick just outside, munching on a cheese puff pastry with mushroom pate and staring up into the sky.

"Enjoying the hors d'oeuvres?"

He smiles, his mouth full, his heart incredibly light. She raises her eyebrows at him, and he holds one finger up, chewing and swallowing, a smile pulling at his lips when he finally answers. "Very much. My compliments to the chef."

She leans back against the brick, crossing her arms over her chest. "Compliments accepted."

"You made these?"

"Guilty."

"Wait...did you make all the food in there?"

Her eyes slide down, then to the side, and she catches her upper lip between her teeth. He has to smile again at her now-familiar, nervous gesture. "Maybe."

"You're very talented." He steps closer, and she tips her head up at him, and his brain goes numb.

_How does she do it? _She has worked her way into the periphery of his life, in the month he's been here.

She shrugs, and one shoulder of her shirt slips down enough that he catches sight of a lacy black bra strap. "Much good it'll do me, right?"

Maybe she's closer than the periphery. Maybe she's working her way further in.

"You never know," he says. He reaches out and brushes her arm with his rough fingertips, running them up and down once, elbow to shoulder and back. And god, her skin is soft. When he touches her, it feels like she might melt. "I'd love to see what you can really do."

Her long-lashed eyes flash up at his, suddenly, and he feels her look with a jolt.

One of her friends leans out of the door, then, laughing and a little drunk, and yells for her to rejoin the party.

"In a minute," she calls over her shoulder, keeping her eyes steady on him.

...

"Okay," Prue says, smiling down at the answer key to the exams he has been grading. "Answer me this. In what year was the Panem Pact ratified?"

Dannick leans back in his chair, resting his head against the wall behind him, and lets out a booming laugh. "I thought you were going to challenge me. That's the third question on the exam; they get harder from there."

A smile steals onto her face. "Just answer the question. Quit stalling." It's a Tuesday night, 15 minutes until closing, and the bakery is deserted. Dannick has been working at a corner table all afternoon and evening, grading winter exams and term projects.

He leans forward. "The answer is 76. Can we move on now, please? I want to dazzle you with my knowledge."

She looks up, eyes teasing, and shakes her head. "You'll have to dazzle me some other way,"

He frowns. "What? You know I'm right."

Oh, how she loves catching him out. "Well," she says, drawing the word out and inspecting her fingernails, "I guess I wouldn't expect you to know something like that. Being from a district with such inferior educational standards..."

He swats at her with a rolled-up paper, but she ducks him easily. "Come on, next question."

She levels a challenging look at him. "It's not 76, by the way."

He lets out a puff of air and widens his eyes. "It is, everyone knows that."

"Everyone is wrong." She leans forward. "You remember my mom's old friend, Minister Hawthorne?"

"Um...yeah. From 12, right? Fought with distinction in the Capitol Seige. Headed up the Committee to..."

"Right. Him." She inclines her head back toward the kitchen area; the clanking of pots and pans and the spray of water are just barely audible. "Brother to my co-worker back there, incidentally."

"Really?"

"Mmm-hmm." She catches his eye again; he is fighting back a smile; the corners of his mouth twitching.

"Is there a point to this? Because if not, I have exams to grade."

"How can you grade those if you don't know the right answers yourself?"

He drops his pen onto the tabletop. "Fine. Out with it."

"Hawthorne had an ongoing feud with the Representative from 7. Mason. She loved to wind him up, and if she could do it in a professional capacity, so much the better."

"Kind of like someone else I know."

"Do you want to hear the story, or not?" He presses his lips together, makes a 'zipping' gesture with his fingers. "So when it came time for all the districts to ratify the treaty, she waited until the absolute last minute on the day of the deadline. And she kept holding it up. And holding it up." She grins at the memory of her "Aunt" Johanna. Queen of mischief. "It was a different excuse every month. She'd found some technicality in the wording that she didn't like. The courier got held up. The train was late. She told him anything she could think of. Finally, he got frustrated enough to pack up his staff and make a special trip up there to fetch her signature himself. But by then..."

He sits back in his chair again, eyeing her skeptically. "Let me guess. By then, it wasn't 76 anymore."

"Nope. It was 77. In honor of..." She spreads her hands out, palms up. "District 7."

"Wow." He stares at her, and she doesn't look away, fighting to keep her eyes wide and honest. It's almost too much. But he breaks away first, shuffling a few papers on the tabletop in front of him. "You know, I'm going to have to verify that independently."

She covers her heart with her hand, feigning offense. "What? My word isn't good enough?"

He chuckles, his eyes crinkling up in the corners. "No, I believe you. I just can't believe I've never heard that before."

"Well, Hawthorne was pretty embarrassed about it."

"I'll bet." There is a pause; he's running his fingers over and over one of the papers and she has an overwhelming urge to reach out and grab his hand. "Wait. Weren't they married, eventually? Hawthorne and Mason?"

She smiles, and coughs out a small laugh. "Yeah. They _were_."

He shifts in his seat, and suddenly she remembers. Dannick was married before, too. Divorce is still uncommon enough in the Districts that, when word came that the son of the victor Finnick Odair was splitting with his wife, the talk had reached even as far as 12.

No one knew what had happened. And Prue hadn't asked. _I needed a change of scene_; hadn't he said something like that?

Stupidly, it hadn't even entered her head until now. "Oh. I'm…sorry. I didn't mean to-"

He shakes his head, his expression suddenly somber. "I should get back to grading these."

She nods. "I should go close." She gets up, unwraps her apron from the back of the chair, pulls it over her head. "Hey…are we still on for Friday?"

He looks up, momentarily confused.

"I'm…cooking you dinner. My place?" The apron strings seem larger and harder to maneuver than usual, and she twists her body to frown at them. "You said once that you wanted to see what I could really do." A pause. "In the kitchen."

A faint smile. "Oh yeah…"

"Well. I intend to show you."

She retreats back into the kitchen, pulse pounding in her ears, his bewildered look burned into her retinas. _What did I do? What did I just do?_

…

Dannick's arms around her in the Meadow, after dinner, are warm and unexpected, and she slowly lowers her own arm from pointing out the constellation Cassiopeia, to rest it lightly on top of his, which is now circling her waist.

"Hi," she breathes.

"Hello." He brushes her hair aside and lowers his head so that his breath tickles her neck. "Do you mind?"

"N-no." She says it too quickly, far too softly. This is not how it usually goes. She is never taken by surprise.

But she is taken by surprise when he kisses her. He is very gentle and very cautious, still standing behind her and tilting her head back, and she is consumed, her hands gripping his arm, skin warm and throbbing.

…..

"I don't like it," Peeta says.

She freezes. "You don't like what?"

"I'm not an idiot." She turns slowly away from the door, which she's been trying to close as silently as possible. "He's 16 years older than you."

"I can count, Daddy." She levels a glare at him, but can't meet his eyes in the shadowy hallway. She can tell he never got dressed today, probably just got out of bed, from the rumpled look of him. "And I'm a grown-ass woman."

"He doesn't have the best track record," her dad says. "With women. Grown-ass or otherwise."

"Lot of problems in the world, Dad," she says, trailing her hand along the railing as she climbs the stairs toward the room she's occupied since she was born. "Other people's love lives register pretty low on the list, wouldn't you say?"

"I don't _like it_," Peeta says again, and she hasn't heard his voice sound dark and menacing like that since…ever.

She whirls to face him when she reaches the top of the stairs; he's at the bottom, still in shadow, the moonlight making his white hair glow silver. "Well why don't you actually get out of bed tomorrow morning and come to the bakery with me. Then you could, oh I don't know, actually talk to him, instead of making assumptions."

He's standing silently in the shadows, still, when her bedroom door slams behind her.

….

"Robbie just finished his exams, back in 4."

They are lingering in the back room of the bakery, where all the dry supplies are stored; her hair is mussed and her bra is undone; his shirt is untucked and her hands are splayed across his back.

At the mention of his son, she pulls back, peering up at him. "So they get a winter break in 4 too, huh? Even though there's no winter?" She plucks at the skin of his side, trying to tickle, but he grabs her hand, planting a kiss on her palm and then cradling it between his two hands.

She still feels so soft, to him. Like she could slip out of his grip and away from him, at any time. He says, "Yeah, they do. I'm going back there for two weeks, to see him before school starts again." Her face falls immediately, and his heart trip-hammers. He doesn't know he's going to say it until he already has: "Come with me."

She frowns. "To 4?"

"Yes. To visit. You say you've visited before, to see your grandmother? You liked it, right?"

She pulls her hand away, leans against the back wall of the store room. "I…don't know. If I could just leave like that."

"Think about it. I'd…" _Oh, hell_. "I'd like you to meet him." Robin, he means; his son. Aged 10. Robbie. They've talked about Robbie before. But never as someone that Prue could ever potentially meet.

"I'll let you know, okay?"

…..

They take separate compartments on the train, of course.

It is an overnight trip from 12 to 4, the train thundering southwest across the continent while the passengers sleep. She strips down to a long t-shirt and fights back a smile at the soft knock on her compartment door, just after midnight.

She opens the door without hesitation, smirking at the sight of him, still fully dressed but rumpled-looking. She leans against the doorway, crossing her arms, both of them swaying a little with the movement of the train. "What are you doing here, Mr. Odair?"

His face blanches in panic, then relaxes as her smirk grows into a warm smile. One he remembers, from the first day he saw her. Hesitant, yet inviting and open. All that defines her. He glances down at her bare legs, and his eyes are dark and heavy when he looks up again. "Why don't you tell me."

She catches her upper lip between her teeth. Lets it go. Parts her lips. Snakes out one hand and grabs his belt buckle, pulling him into the tiny compartment.

Another swaying movement of the train sends them crashing into the wall, limbs tangled in an instant.

He grabs her backside and lifts her; with a shaky sigh, she brings her legs up around his waist and grips his shoulders with sweaty palms. They cling together and kiss like teenagers, barely coming up for air.

He is gentle, pushing into her slowly, agonizingly slowly. She pulls at him, moaning, but he doesn't yield.

"Shh," he says. "Easy." He brushes her hair away and rests his face against her shoulder.

She can feel his breath, as he gasps against her. Cold on the inhale, warm and wet on the exhale. In, out.

"Easy," he murmurs again. "Enjoy this."

She does. Oh, she does.

….

His son, Robbie, is a tall, slim 10-year-old with glowing auburn hair, bronzed skin and his father's green eyes. The eyes are skeptical as they regard Prue; she squints in the bright sunlight sparkling off the ocean and wonders if everyone in 4 is born with beautiful, smooth bronze skin and a perfect physique. It seems so.

The boy does not trust her; he does not like her. He's seen more than enough of the heartache love can bring. She approaches him slowly, talking, asking him about school and sports, hunting seashells with him as they all stroll down the beach together, Prue and Dannick and Robin and Prue's Grandma Merry. Merry is in her 80s now, but still able to keep up, her body still lean and strong, her smile knowing as she watches her granddaughter.

Prue and Robbie race down the beach, leaving Dannick and Grandma Merry far behind. They stop in front of the abandoned mansion at the far end of the beach, perched there alone where the sand peters out into long grass.

"What's this?" Prue asks, turning to Dannick as he catches up with them and lays a hand across her back.

He glances at the empty house, then back at her. "All that's left of the Victor's Village," he says.

"Oh." She frowns. Then, before he can stop her, she trots over and climbs the rickety stairs, picking her way across the wrap-around porch and shading her eyes to peer in through the broken glass of a side window. "Huge kitchen," she calls back over her shoulder. She moves across the porch and pokes her head in where a huge plate-glass window used to be. "Oh wow," she says, "Look at this living room. Beautiful."

Joining her, Dannick looks over what used to be the spacious living area and back terrace of a Victor's home. Both look out over the sparkling ocean. He says nothing, but holds Robbie back with a hand on his shoulder, preventing him from going in and picking through the ruin.

"Wouldn't this make a great restaurant," Prue says, looking back at him, her eyes shining. Enthusiastic. Not a hint of sarcasm or teasing, for almost the first time since he's known her. "Perfect location. The kitchen's more than big enough. And this back room, and the terrace? That would be the dining room. We could use it year-round, it never gets cold here…"

She trails off, then, because of course, there is no _We_. And _she_ will be doing nothing of the kind. She will be returning to 12, to the bakery, to her father. She glances from Dannick to Robbie, to Grandma Merry, climbing the rickety stairs behind them. She drops her eyes, catches her upper lip and bites down, hard.

….

"You should have seen it, Daddy," she gushes. "It was so beautiful. Just like I remembered." She's flitting around the kitchen, fixing a light supper for the two of them. Peeta watches the fluid ease with which she moves, from cupboard to fridge to burner to cutting board.

"And this old house? Right on the beach. Perfect location for a restaurant. It's just standing there, abandoned." She glances at him; her smile is so genuine, so open, that it cuts into his heart.

"So many houses are, there. So many people in 4 are just…floundering. The Capitol used to keep the fishing stock built up, somehow, but now they can't, of course, and a lot of fishermen are out of work, and the place is just crying out for business, now that people from the Capitol don't go there as much. It's such a beautiful place, and so sad…and all this building needs, really, is a little bit of work. It would employ so many people who need a job. It would…" And on and on.

Peeta watches her, his eyes narrowed, his brown furrowed.

Eventually, she goes quiet.

….

"Come with me," murmurs Dannick, pushing his nose into her bare back, his voice a low rumble against her ribs.

She's known this was coming, for some time, now. He's going back to 4, at the end of the school year. They want him back. He misses Robbie.

"I can't," Prue whispers, barely audible. She doesn't want to be saying it. "I can't leave him."

He trails kisses up her back, following the dip of her spine until he reaches her throat. "Come back with me," he murmurs into her hair, flicking his tongue out and tasting her earlobe.

"I can't," she says, again. "I can't…he's…worse now...oh." He's running his fingertips over her nipples, over and over. "Don't stop. Don't..." One of his hands drifts lower, knuckles ghosting over her hip, finally cupping her wetness with his whole hand.

"Come with me," he whispers, and this time he means something different.

And she does. This, she can give to him.

…

Dannick leaves 12 on a sunny day in late June, and that day, Prue works a double shift at the bakery, opening to closing. She keeps busy, laughing, chatting, restocking, mixing and baking.

Posy is not fooled. "You know," she says, walking up just behind Prue at the workbench and making her jump. "My Galen is graduating this year. Gonna be looking for a job soon. Told him he should think about coming here."

Prue frowns. "Oh?" Galen is a tall, handsome, but absentminded lad of 18, who has worked at the bakery off and on for years, after school and over summer and winter breaks. She never thought he showed a great aptitude for it. "Okay. Tell him to come by next week-"

"You're not fooling anyone, you know."

Prue spins to face Posy, who's wearing a knowing smirk.

"What do you mean?"

Posy sighs, turning back to her mixing bowl. "Life is too short not to chase what makes you happy," she says. And that's all she'll say, no matter how Prue presses her.

...

"If there's one thing I have always hated, it's being used."

Prue's head snaps up from her book; in truth, she's been reading the same line over and over. She hadn't realized her dad was still awake.

"Um, Dad? What are you talking about?"

Peeta is standing in the doorway of the dining room in three-day-old pajamas, his white hair sticking up in the back. He looks her in the eyes, and his expression is neutral, even matter-of-fact. He continues as if he didn't hear her. "My mom used to use me, to get back at my dad."

Her mouth drops open in shock. If talk of her mother is rare and painful, talk of _his_ mother is unheard of. "The people in the Capitol used me for entertainment, dressing me up like a doll and then throwing me into the arena," he goes on, advancing into the room and grasping the back of a dining-room chair. "President Coin used me, when she decided she wanted your mother dead." He laughs, a dark, dry sound with no humor. "Boy, did that backfire."

Prue bolts to her feet, backs away from the table. _What? What is he saying?_ He isn't making sense.

"And now you." His voice is low and deadly, like that night in the front hallway, when she'd just barely been afraid of him, again. Like she is now.

"Me? Dad." This is not him. He must be having an episode. He hasn't really had one since her mother died, but maybe they're returning. She takes a few deep breaths, tries to remember what to do, what to say. It's been so long. "Why don't you-"

"You. Using me as an excuse."

"Um..." She doesn't know what he wants from her. What to say.

"You're afraid to go to 4. Afraid of what it might mean. So you're telling yourself you're staying for me."

_Oh god. How could he know that Dannick asked me to go with him?_ "I _am_ staying for you."

"Bull."

"It's not. Have you seen yourself lately?" She is on the verge of tears, suddenly and without warning.

"Have you ever had a relationship before, that lasted more than two months?" The answer is _no_. No, not until Dannick. And he damn well knows it. "What do you think your mother would say? If she knew you were afraid and you couldn't face this? The idea that someone loves you?"

That stops her. He's said it in such an even tone and so calmly, it doesn't immediately register that he's talking, voluntarily, about her mother.

"That someone needs you? Someone who's not me?"

"I'm not afraid." But her voice, broken and weak, betrays her.

"Bullshit." He steps closer to her, and she can't meet his eyes. "You care about him, like you didn't care about the others. You've never felt this, and it scares you."

"No."

"I'm not going to pretend I like it. I'll probably never like it. But you are just rotting away here, Prue, miserable. You put a good face on for everyone else, like I always could. But I've seen it."

"And what about you, you hypocrite?" The anger blazes up in her, and the words flow as from a hot spigot.

His mouth opens, shocked. "What did you say to me?"

"You heard me." She rounds the table, bearing down on him, and when they are nose to nose, they both realize, with a start, that they are now of a height. Equals. "What do you think Mom would say, if she could see _you_ now?"

The wound she has given him is visible, palpable, lethal. He takes a step back, gripping at his chest through his thin shirt. "Don't you...dare..."

"Come on, Dad. Look around." She throws her arms out, to encompass the room, the house…the whole world. "You don't paint. You don't bake. You barely remember to tie your shoes. You barely leave the house, except to wander into the woods and camp out on her grave. You are a _shell_ of the man I once knew."

"Don't..."

"What? Tell the truth? Look at us. Both of us." The tears are flowing down her cheeks; she doesn't remember when she started crying, only knows that she now can't stop. He comes to her slowly, like she's a wounded animal, and wraps his arms around her in that gentle way of his, letting his own tears fall onto her shoulder. "What happened to us, Daddy?" She gives a loud sniff. "What the hell happened?"

There is a long silence. Then, he pulls away from her, looking into her face, calm and serious.

"You love him. Real, or not real?"

"Dad."

"Real. Or not real." He is looking right at her.

She never could lie to him.

"...Real. I love him. Real." She dissolves again. This time, smiling. Relief.

"Then you have to go." He kisses the crown of her head, the part that was soft when she was first born, that they'd had to protect. But no more. "I'll miss you, Blueberry." Haymitch's old name for her.

They cry, together. Then, Peeta lumbers upstairs, showers, dresses, and heads for the bakery.

He's got some catching up to do.

…..

She comes back to 4 on a warm day in early September, walking straight from the train station to the school, lugging her bag over her shoulder. It's a long walk, but her back is straight and strong, and her head is clear.

She waits until the children have gone for the day. (She was right, she thinks; they are all just born gorgeous and tanned, here.) Then she slips into the front office and asks in which classroom she can find Dannick Odair.

She waits in the doorway, watching him. He is running his fingertips over and over his temple, gripping the pen tightly in his other hand. He must have a headache. He looks up.

"Prue."

She smiles, hesitant but warm. "I bought the place," she says. And his face lights up with understanding. "I brought my recipes." He stands, moves around the desk. She takes a few steps forward. "I'll need to hire some people; a cleaning crew, some carpenters, construction workers. Eventually, a staff. There's a lot to do. I talked with the District council-"

She is cut off by his mouth on hers, suddenly, insistently. She wraps herself around him, and it's like they never left one another, like there was no long summer in between their last touch and this one, here, now.

She's home.


End file.
